Seven Lies Page 17

  Other than that, I didn’t notice her prying into my life, but that’s not to say that she didn’t. There was so much online that she could have found had she looked in the right places—which she probably did. There were articles I’d written for the university magazine and several pieces about Jonathan: on his death, on his marathon run, and the footage recorded afterward was still available. And there were one or two articles on my company’s website that used my name and discussed improvements in customer service.

  She must have found something in all of that to inspire her. Perhaps she really thought she’d solved a mystery. But the piece on her website put forth yet another lie. It said that I had murdered Jonathan, pushing him into the path of an oncoming vehicle. I had then sold his apartment, making a substantial profit, and scooped up his life insurance policy. I had made a fortune—her words, not mine—by murdering my husband.

  But that wasn’t all. Her piece continued, espousing bullshit backed by no evidence and no sources whatsoever. She claimed that Marnie and I—malicious vixens and secret lovers—had found our strategy so successful that we had promptly repeated our plan a second time.

  MARRIAGE. MURDER. MONEY.

  That was emblazoned at the very bottom of the page. She wrote that we were now living in utter bliss, reveling in our wealth, the fortunes extracted from the fists of our dead husbands.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  We might never have heard of Valerie, might never have read her article, if it hadn’t been picked up by a national tabloid newspaper. Her website had a few thousand followers—mainly young Londoners—and perhaps we’d have stumbled across it eventually or maybe it would have been flagged by one of Marnie’s fans. But it was equally possible that our lives would have continued uninterrupted.

  Unfortunately, it ended up on the front page of a paper distributed across the country in a piece that heralded the nation’s growing fascination with true crime. Apparently, there were thousands of blogs, hundreds of podcasts. It used our story as an example.

  They said that the blog post had gone viral. It had been shared on Facebook and Twitter more than one hundred thousand times, which while not exceptional was certainly remarkable. Maybe they were telling the truth; perhaps people really were interested in the story of two young women who’d murdered their husbands. I suppose I can’t blame them; I’d have been, too. But the cynic in me wonders if that feature was simply a disguise, a clever way to publish defamatory stories and to cash in on the noise and the excitement without real legal risk. They quoted from Valerie’s website several times, but they referred to an “alleged” murder and didn’t directly accuse us of anything.

  The piece was published a few pages in, but there was a small, incendiary headline on the front, and Marnie and I were immediately inundated by messages from our friends and families. They were horrified not by our supposed behavior but instead on our behalf. They didn’t believe a word of it, they said. Have you ever heard such rubbish? And what was the world coming to; was fact-checking still a thing in this day and age? They eagerly reassured us that no one who mattered would pay any attention whatsoever to that sort of drivel.

  We hadn’t seen the article at that point—we didn’t know there was a website—and so I rushed to the corner shop to pick up a copy, still in my flannel pajamas, the garish pattern hidden beneath a long black raincoat. I brought it back to the flat and laid it open on the breakfast bar. Marnie and I read it together, our eyes sliding left and right as we skimmed each line in tandem and our faces contorting at similar moments, identical frowns for the same terrible lies.

  There was a line from Valerie at the end. It said, I absolutely understand the fascination with these stories, but I think it’s wrong to focus specifically on the bloodshed and assume that death in itself is the cause of the allure. For me—and for many of my regular readers—it’s more about the truth than it is about melodrama or scandal. There was a link to her website.

  I pulled my laptop from beneath the sofa and opened it up on the countertop. The website was slow to load—I suppose we weren’t the only ones looking for the original piece—but eventually that red headline appeared on the screen.

  The truth is that Valerie’s article didn’t make much sense. The facts didn’t support her proposed version of events at all. I didn’t kill Jonathan. He was killed by a taxi driver, a man in his late fifties who was serving a prison sentence, having been arrested for inadvertently causing a death while driving drunk. And, after the mortgage had been repaid, there was very little profit from the sale of his flat, mainly thanks to the recession and the subsequent property crisis. And I hadn’t spent a penny of his life insurance payout.

  Valerie was suggesting that we were so inspired by this overwhelming success—again, her words—that we then waited a not insignificant four years to reenact our plan once more.

  How did they do it the second time? she wrote. I have to confess that I was tempted to finish the story here today. I considered keeping you waiting until next week for an update. But I just couldn’t do it, not with a story this tantalizing. Even so, I’ll leave a space below and do take a moment or two to think about this: What did they do the second time?

  I scrolled down.

  The drugs, she wrote. Is that what you were thinking? If you had something more grisly in mind, then I think you’re underestimating these two women. Jane Black wasn’t directly responsible for the death of her husband: she wasn’t driving the car that killed him. She simply manipulated the situation to achieve her desired result. The same is true of Marnie Gregory-Smith. She didn’t push her husband down the stairs—we know that she was at the library when he died—but she might have smuggled a few extra tablets into his coffee that morning.

  It was nonsense.

  But the truth didn’t matter. Because, as I’ve said before, even the strangest fiction can feel entirely true. And believable lies are no great feat. It was a brilliant story. And that was what mattered most.

  I should say now that I didn’t respond this calmly at the time. I wasn’t pragmatic at all. I was really fucking angry. It burned in my stomach, like that acidic ache when you know you’ve eaten something rotten, and I felt a strange adrenalized excitement spasming in my limbs. I was alive with rage, much as I had been when I first hated Charles. I assumed that Marnie would feel the same, but when I looked over at her she was crying.

  “How could she . . .” she whispered, so quiet and airy that her voice sounded almost like a hiss. “How could she write something like . . . It’s not true. How can she lie? She’s said that—oh, God—how can she say this stuff? Who is this woman?”

  She pointed to a line in the middle of the screen. Her index finger was trembling. A few words were there in bold, isolated from the rest of the text.

  “They’ve always been close,” says a friend of the two young women. “Always very insular. Intimate, I’d say.”

  “Who the fuck is that?” She slammed her empty mug down on the worktop. “Who the fuck has said that? What sort of— Both our husbands are fucking dead. And some little bitch is— Who the fuck, Jane? Who is that?”

  “Marnie,” I said, and I was a little frightened by her, because I’d never once, not in twenty years, seen her lose her temper—she was always so contained—and yet here she was, angrier than I’d ever seen anyone. “Let’s just take a minute.”

  “A minute? We don’t have a fucking minute. Jane, this will be everywhere already. This bloody piece is on doormats across the country, waiting to be read with a cup of coffee and a slice of fucking toast, there in supermarkets and newsstands and at fucking airports, and then they’ll all pick up their laptops—we did, didn’t we? It’s there in people’s tablets already, all black and white and shining on a screen.”

  “Marnie. Let’s just—” It was sort of thrilling to see her so wild.

  “Do you think my parents have seen it?” she said. “Oh,
God. My parents have read it. Oh, fucking hell. And if they haven’t, then how long will it be—not very long, I can tell you that right now—until they receive a knock on the door from a neighbor or a polite little text from a golf club chum that says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry that your family are featuring in the fucking tabloids, what an imposition,’ and snicker snicker, then they’ll fucking know. It’s on the internet, for fuck’s sake. They’re going to be livid. Their colleagues will read it. Oh, Jesus, Jane. What do we do?”

  And then, as quickly as she’d appeared, she was gone, and Marnie was crying again, her head in her hands and her body shaking and all of that strength and power dissipating into the space around her.

  * * *

  That was the moment my fear reappeared. It built in me like a fever. It started with her anger. I could see the shape of it; I could feel its vibrations. I knew that it might one day come for me. And then the realization that there was someone somewhere who was unconvinced by the most obvious answers, the facts as they’d been confirmed.

  There was something in the way Valerie wrote, in the shape of her sentences, that was so much more sinister than the words themselves. I had this inkling then that we were only at the very beginning. I had a suspicion tightly tied to my fear that the worst was still to come.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A few hours later, we began to receive calls from other media outlets. I’d installed a landline phone when I’d first moved in because it made my internet substantially cheaper, but I soon regretted that decision. The messages were never-ending, long and descriptive or short and punchy, but vast in number and arriving quicker than we could possibly delete them. And soon they were emailing and texting us, too. The story had captured the imaginations of their readers, or listeners, or audiences. And what did we have to say about it? Did we want to add our comments? They promised us—all of them—that they were different from the other reporters, or radio hosts, or broadcasters. The others simply cared about numbers, about the drama, about being part of the hype. But us? No, that’s not us at all. We really care. And this was the moment—“this is your moment,” they all said—to put the record straight.

  Don’t laugh. It’s not funny. What are you laughing at? “Put the record straight”? Well, yes, I suppose that is a little funny. I certainly wasn’t going to be doing that.

  Anyway, Marnie and I knew that the lie—the fantastical tale of two lesbian murderesses—was more tantalizing than the truth. Or, at least, than the assumed truth. Who didn’t want to read about the two Machiavellian widows living in sin?

  And so we said nothing. We unplugged the landline and turned off our mobiles and redirected every email that wasn’t from a recognized sender to our junk and spam folders. Then we locked the front door and didn’t leave the flat for two weeks, ordering food online every few days and illegally streaming new movies. I didn’t call my boss, but I assume someone in the office had seen the article because I received a very simple message to be in touch as and when I felt able to return.

  Marnie and I were confident that the drama would ease eventually. There is always a more interesting story waiting to be told. And, thankfully, the photograph used in the newspaper was horribly pixelated. It had been taken in our first summer home from university and our fancy-dress costumes, while undeniably sexy, made us rather hard to identify. There were others of Marnie—on her website, on social media—and I know that there was one of me hidden somewhere on my company’s website, but that must have been the only one of us both. We simply had to be patient.

  Even so, I wanted to know more about the strange woman who had so disturbingly inserted herself into our lives and so I scoured the internet for information. I found out about her marriage: her ex-husband, his new wife, their wedding website. I scrolled downward, backward, until I found the wedding venue, the endorsement they’d given the caterers. I found photographs of her home on Instagram: they showed the shared flat she now lived in; her roommate, recognizable immediately; the balcony where they’d sat in the summer drinking wine. I could see the name of the café opposite and it was easy then to find it online, to know where she lived. In the last few weeks, she’d started attending tap dancing classes and she’d uploaded several videos of a troupe of six all spinning and clacking and moving with frenzied feet as though their limbs were elastic. Her work was perhaps the easiest of all: the previous entries on her website, none of them nearly as tantalizing as the one she’d written about us.

  I didn’t think then to retrace her steps through the previous decades—that came later—but I was still astonished by the volume of data available literally at my fingertips, with just a few clicks. It frightened me to know that I was just as visible, that my life could be so easily penetrated. I watched her in the intervening weeks, as she uploaded images of her whereabouts with the locations tagged and posted about her plans and wrote a roundup of upcoming events in the area.

  I felt sure that she was watching me, too.

  Maybe the furor would have quieted if we’d waited a few more weeks. But Marnie didn’t. She couldn’t. The fiction written online was intensifying within her: the murder, the drugs, his death. It seemed more likely every day. She slept with it at night as it staged itself in her dreams. She was by turns listless then restless, only ever sleeping briefly before the nightmare began again. She could remember dropping the tablets into his coffee. She could picture herself standing on her tiptoes, reaching for the packet in the cupboard above the sink and popping the pills from their blister packs and poisoning her husband. And then, when she hadn’t slept in days, she started experiencing strange hallucinations and wondering if maybe she’d pushed him after all. Had she been there all along? Had she stood behind him at the top of the stairs? She could see it: the prints hanging framed on the wall and the carpet beneath her feet and she knew what it felt like to touch him, to run her fingers between his shoulder blades, to lay her palm flat against his spine. She wasn’t eating; although she was drinking. She wasn’t sleeping; she was frantic and feverish. She needed to state the truth as she knew it before the lie consumed her.

  “It wasn’t for me,” she said afterward. “I didn’t do it for me. I could have lived with it. But Charles? He would never have married the woman they said that I was. They’ve all made him seem so naive and so stupid and he was never those things. I couldn’t let that become the story that defined him.”

  And so she met with Valerie just two weeks after that first piece was published. She exhumed the newspaper from the recycling bin and she searched for the journalist’s name and she went back to the website and she sent an email. And received an offer of a breakfast the following morning at the café on the ground floor of my building.

  If I had known, I could have stopped her. But by the time I woke up, her spot beside me was cold.

  Valerie was, I imagine, rather disappointed by Marnie. I suppose she had been hoping for sordid details and revelations and something that confirmed her version of events. Marnie might have confessed to doling out the tablets that morning, to not checking the instructions quite carefully enough, or perhaps not at all, to being overwrought and overworked and overestimating the quantities in her haste. But, of course, she didn’t.

  I can only guess that the story was unexpectedly dull. Marnie would have gone on and on about Charles’s migraines. She would have said—at least twice—that she’d been worried that he might have a brain tumor. But the doctor—and he was a nice man, a good doctor, they trusted him—had always been insistent: just migraines. And when they came they were pretty severe; they always had been. She should have stayed at home. She could have looked after him. She’d have brought him a glass of water, or a sandwich, or whatever it was that he’d wanted. She could have saved him.

  Valerie would have looked at Marnie—slight and fair, her hair unbrushed, the dark circles pooling beneath her eyes, the almost imperceptible trembling—and would have known that her piece
, as entertaining as it was, simply couldn’t be true. This woman—sniveling into her coffee, so bloody frail and broken—was incapable of murder.

  I wonder if Valerie felt frustrated. She had hoped, I’m sure, for something else. She wanted Part 2 to build on Part 1: more detail and drama and excitement. And instead she had a contradiction, an accusation that wouldn’t survive scrutiny.

  She must have been livid. But she was also smart. And so she worked with what she had. She manipulated their conversation—the little revelations, the snippets that she’d wrung from a grieving widow—to expose a more interesting update.

  Marnie returned to the flat with fresh croissants—they’d been our weekend treat in the Vauxhall flat—and I assumed that this marked a change in her outlook, the beginning again of striving for a new normal. I didn’t suspect anything until the following morning when I received a call from Emma. She had registered for updates from Valerie’s website and had received an email in the early hours informing her that a new post had been uploaded. The email said that Valerie had revised her earlier piece as a result of some “new evidence.” She had—this time—uncovered the real truth, a much darker truth and one that revealed not only the relationships that these two women had with their late husbands, but also more detail about their relationship with each other.

  I opened the page on my laptop.

  Valerie had written that I was jealous. She said that Marnie had been happy—unexpectedly so—and that I couldn’t stand to see her so content with somebody else. I had committed a murder for her—apparently—and I was horrified when she then wouldn’t do the same for me. The piece was long and convoluted, and almost all of it was nonsense. But the main point she wanted to make, it seemed, was that the blame rested solely with me. Marnie had been unable to kill Charles, because “perhaps she really loved him,” Valerie had written. And so I had taken the necessary steps to ensure that she couldn’t renege on the original deal. I was the puppeteer of the entire dastardly scheme. I was the true antagonist. I had killed him.