Let Me Lie(57)

‘A little bird tells me you were in the Lion’s den this morning …’ Nish said.

That hadn’t taken long.

‘The Lion?’ Gill was topping up everyone’s glasses. Sarah held hers out, and Murray tried not to let his face reflect his thoughts. A bit of alcohol made Sarah buoyant. Happy. A lot had the opposite effect.

‘Superintendent Leo Griffiths,’ Nish explained. ‘Fond of roaring.’

‘Would the little bird who told you that have had flashing bauble earrings and tinsel in her hair?’

‘No idea – she texted me. I take it your plan to single-handedly solve Eastbourne’s historic murders has been thwarted?’

Murray took a sip of his wine. ‘If anything, I’m even more determined to get to the bottom of what happened to the Johnsons, especially now things have escalated.’

Nish nodded. ‘The brick’s gone for further analysis. No fingerprints, I’m afraid – it’s a bugger of a surface, and whoever wrapped the paper around it was forensically aware enough to wear gloves. But I can tell you that the note wrapped around the brick was printed on different paper to the one used for the card. And it was produced on a different printer.’

Sarah put down her glass. ‘They came from different people?’

‘Not necessarily, but it’s possible.’

‘That makes sense.’ Sarah looked at Murray. ‘Doesn’t it? One person prompting Anna to dig into the past; the other warning her off.’

‘Maybe.’ Like Nish, Murray was reluctant to commit, but he was fast coming to the same conclusion himself: they weren’t dealing with one person, but two. The anniversary card came from someone who knew the truth about what had happened to Caroline Johnson, and wanted Anna to ask questions. Last night’s note was a different matter. An instruction. A threat.

No police. Stop before you get hurt.

‘Why send a warning, unless you’re the murderer?’

Murray couldn’t fault Sarah’s logic.

Whoever threw that brick through the window of Anna’s house was responsible for Tom’s and Caroline’s deaths, and it looked as though they weren’t finished with the Johnsons yet. Murray needed to unravel this case before Anna – or her baby – got hurt.





THIRTY-ONE


ANNA


Mark and Joan talk, but it’s as though I’m under water. Every now and then one of them shoots me a concerned look, before offering me tea, or wine, or why don’t you have a little sleep?

I don’t need to sleep. I need to understand what the hell is going on.

Where have my parents been for the last year? How did they fake their suicides so convincingly that no one suspected a thing? And – most importantly – why did they do it?

It doesn’t make sense. I’ve found no evidence of debts, no suggestion that my parents moved large amounts of money out of their accounts before they disappeared. When the wills were read, everything – more or less – came to me. Dad borrowed money for the business, but it was only after he died – and Billy fell apart – that the business started struggling. My parents weren’t bankrupt – they can’t have done this for financial reasons.

My head is spinning.

‘We need to talk,’ I say, when Joan’s out of the room.

‘We do.’ Mark’s face is serious. ‘After Christmas, once Mum’s gone home, let’s get a babysitter and go out for dinner. Have a proper talk about everything. I was thinking: the counsellor doesn’t have to be someone I know, if that’s what’s bothering you – I can get a recommendation.’

‘No, but—’

Joan comes back in. She’s holding a game of Scrabble. ‘I wasn’t sure if you had a set, so I brought mine. Shall we have a game now?’ She looks at me with her head cocked to one side. ‘How are you doing, love? I know it’s hard for you.’

‘I’m okay.’ Lying by omission; passing off my peculiar mood as a symptom of grief. Another Christmas without my parents. Poor Anna. She misses them so much.

I shuffle Scrabble letters around on the little tray in front of me, unable to see the patterns in even the simplest of words. What am I going to do? Should I call the police? I think of lovely, kind Murray Mackenzie and feel a fresh wave of shame. He believed me. The only person who admitted there was something not quite right. The only person who agreed my parents might have been murdered.

And all the time it was a lie.

‘Jukebox!’ Joan says. ‘Seventy-seven.’

‘Two words, surely?’

‘Definitely one.’

I tune out from their good-natured argument.

At various times over the last nineteen months, grief has been overtaken by another emotion.

Anger.

‘It’s completely normal to feel angry when a loved one dies,’ Mark said, during my first counselling session. ‘Particularly when we feel the person who died made an active choice to leave us.’

An active choice.

My hand – holding a letter E I picked from the pile in the middle of the table – starts to shake violently. I drop the letter onto the rack and push my hands into my lap, squeezing them between my knees. I have spent the last year actively ‘working through’ – to use Mark’s vocabulary – my anger over my parents’ suicides. Turns out it was entirely justified.