The Truth-Teller's Lie Read online

  ‘He doesn’t do overnights any more.’

  ‘So what does he do? Who does he work for?’

  She is picking up speed, and I raise both my hands to stop the flow. ‘Give me a chance,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing mysterious about it. He’s self-employed, but mainly he works for supermarkets—Asda, Sainsbury’s. Tesco.’

  ‘I understand the concept of supermarkets,’ Yvon mutters. ‘You don’t have to list them all.’

  ‘He stopped doing overnights because Juliet didn’t like being left on her own. So most days he loads up out of Spilling, drives to Tilbury, where he loads up again. Or sometimes he loads up out of Dartford . . .’

  ‘Listen to yourself,’ says Yvon, shooting a puzzled look at me. ‘You’re talking like him. “He loads up out of Dartford”! Do you even know what that means?’

  This is becoming irritating. I say sharply, ‘I assume it means that, in Dartford, he puts some things in his lorry which he then transports back to Spilling.’

  Yvon shakes her head. ‘You don’t get it. I knew you wouldn’t. It’s like he’s taken you over, and what have you got in exchange? He gives you nothing but empty promises. Why can’t he ever stay the night with you? Why can’t Juliet be left on her own?’

  I stare at the road ahead.

  ‘You don’t know, do you? Have you ever said to him, “What exactly is wrong with your wife?”’

  ‘If he wants to tell me, that’s up to him. I don’t want to interrogate him. He’d feel disloyal discussing her problems with me.’

  ‘Very noble of him. Funny, he doesn’t feel disloyal fucking you.’ Yvon sighs. ‘Sorry.’ I hear a trace of something in her voice: scorn, perhaps, or a weary kindness. ‘Look, you saw Juliet yesterday. She appeared to be a self-sufficient, able-bodied grown-up. Not at all the poor, frail thing Robert’s described . . .’

  ‘He hasn’t described her. He’s never said anything specific.’ I am starting to feel a little bit angry. I need all my energy to look for you, to stay positive, to stop myself going crazy with worry and fear. It is too much to have to defend you at the same time. Too preposterous, as well, when the attack comes from someone who’s never met you.

  ‘Why can’t you pin him down? If he can’t leave Juliet now, when will he be able to? What will change between now and then?’

  I want to protect you against the sting of Yvon’s hostility, so I say nothing. You could have lied about why you won’t leave Juliet immediately; many men would have. You could have made up a story that would have kept me at bay: a sick mother, an illness. The truth is harder to accept, but I’m glad you told me. ‘It’s nothing to do with Juliet,’ you said. ‘She won’t change. She’ll never change.’ I heard what sounded like determination in your voice, but perhaps it was a sort of furious resignation, anger filling the gap where hope once was. Your eyes narrowed as you spoke, as if in response to a sudden sharp pain. ‘If I left her now, it’d be the same as if I leave her in a year, or five years, from her point of view.’

  ‘Then why not leave her now?’ I asked. Yvon isn’t the only one who has wondered.

  ‘It’s me,’ you admitted. ‘This won’t make sense, but . . . I’ve thought about leaving her for so long. Planning it, looking forward to it. I’ve probably thought about it too much, in a way. It’s turned into this . . . legendary thing in my mind. I’m paralysed. It’s become too big for me. I get too preoccupied about the details—how and when to do it. In my mind, I’m already caught up in the process of leaving her. The grand finale—what I’ve been working towards for so long.’ You smiled sadly. ‘Trouble is, the process hasn’t yet manifested itself in the world outside my head.’

  You took a long time to say all this, taking care to choose exactly the right words, the ones that most accurately described your feelings. I’ve noticed you don’t like to talk about yourself unless it’s to say how much you love me, or that you only feel truly alive when you’re with me. You’re the opposite of a self-absorbed, oblivious man. Yvon thinks I’m obsessed with you, and she’s right, but she’s never seen you in action. Nobody but me knows how you stare at me hungrily, as if you might never see me again. Nobody has ever felt the way you kiss me. My obsession is dwarfed by yours.

  How can I explain all this to Yvon? I don’t entirely understand it myself.

  ‘What if leaving Juliet always seems too big?’ I asked you. ‘What if you always feel paralysed?’ I’m not a total fool. I’ve seen the same films Yvon has about women who waste their whole lives waiting for their married lovers to get divorced and commit to them properly. Though I will never regard you as a waste of time, no matter what happens. Even if you never leave Juliet, even if all I can ever have of you is three hours a week, I don’t care.

  ‘I will always feel paralysed,’ you said. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and I turned my face away so that you wouldn’t see my disappointment. ‘I’ll always feel the way I do now: hovering on the verge, not ready to throw myself over the edge. But I will do it. I’ll make myself do it. Once, I really wanted to marry Juliet. And I did marry her. Now you’re the one I’m desperate to marry. I look forward to it every minute of every day.’

  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 say
ing. ‘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 answe
r 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.