The Truth-Teller's Lie (9 page)

Simon stepped away from her. He wondered how Robert Haworth had managed to keep up his weekly meetings with Naomi, if Juliet had known about the affair since before Christmas. If she’d only found out last week, that might have explained Haworth’s hasty departure to stay with friends in Kent.

There was a half-formed question lurking in the recesses of Simon’s mind, but before he had a chance to knock it into shape, Juliet Haworth said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and closed the door in his face.

She wasn’t the only one. Simon raised his hand to ring the bell again, then decided against it. To ask any more questions at this stage would be prying. He returned to his car with much relief, turned on the engine, and Radio 4, and had forgotten about Robert Haworth’s sordid little love triangle by the time he reached the end of the street.

 

Charlie marched into the bar of the Hotel Playa Verde and slung her handbag down on a bar stool next to her sister’s. At least Olivia had followed her instructions and waited, instead of rushing to the airport and booking a first-class flight to New York as she’d threatened to. God, she looked out of place in that black off-the-shoulder dress. What had Liv expected? This was a four-hundred-pound, last-minute deal.

‘There’s nothing,’ Charlie said. She took off her glasses and wiped the rain off them with the hem of her shirt.

‘How can there be nothing? There must be a million hotels in Spain. I can’t believe they aren’t
all
better than this one, every man Jack of them.’ Olivia examined her wine glass to make sure it was clean before taking a sip.

Neither she nor Charlie spoke more quietly than usual; neither cared if the barman heard. He was an elderly man from Swansea with two large, navy-blue butterflies tattooed on his forearms. He’d moved here, Charlie had heard him telling a customer earlier, after working for twenty years as a driving instructor. ‘I don’t miss Britain,’ he’d said. ‘It’s gone to shit.’ His sole concession to his new country of residence was to tell everyone who approached the bar that a jug of sangria was half price and would be until the end of the week.

Charlie and Olivia were his only customers this evening, apart from an overweight, orange-skinned couple with a huddle of suitcases around them. They hunched over six peanuts in a silver dish, occasionally poking at them with their thick fingers, as if hoping to roll one over and find something remarkable beneath it. ‘You Wear It Well’ by Rod Stewart was playing very faintly in the background, but you’d have had to strain to hear it properly.

All four walls of the Bar Arena were covered with green, red and navy tartan wallpaper. The ceiling was nicotine-stained Artex. Still, it was the only place to be if you were unfortunate enough to be in the Hotel Playa Verde, since at least it served alcohol. There was no minibar in the tiny room Charlie and Olivia were sharing. This came as a shock to Olivia, who opened every drawer in the cupboard and bent to peer inside it, insisting, ‘It must be here somewhere.’

A net curtain that stank of old cigarettes and grease hung at the bedroom’s narrow window. It couldn’t have been washed for years. The bed Olivia chose because it was closer to the en-suite bathroom was so close that it actually blocked the doorway. If Charlie needed to go to the loo in the night, she would have to climb across the bottom of her sister’s bed. She’d made the effort this afternoon and found dried toothpaste stuck to one of the two plastic glasses by the basin, and a stranger’s soggy hair clogging the bath’s plughole. So far the fire alarm had gone off twice for no noticeable reason. Each time it had been over half an hour before someone had had the gumption to turn it off.

‘Did you look on the Internet?’ asked Olivia

‘Where do you think I’ve been for the past two hours?’ Charlie took a deep breath and ordered a brandy and dry ginger, once more refusing the barman’s offer of half-price sangria, moulding her face into a false smile when he mentioned that she had until the end of the week to take advantage of this one-off special rate. She lit a cigarette, thinking that smoking couldn’t possibly be bad for your health in situations like this, even if it was the rest of the time. The end of the week seemed very, very far away. Plenty of time to kill herself, then, if things didn’t get any better. Perhaps she ought to suicide-bomb the shitty hotel.

‘Trust me, there was nothing you’d have approved of,’ she told Olivia.

‘So there
were
places with availability?’

‘A few. But either they didn’t have pools or they weren’t right on a beach or they had no air conditioning or only a buffet in the evenings . . .’

Olivia was shaking her head. ‘We’re hardly going to need air conditioning or a pool at this rate,’ she said. ‘It’s cold and rainy. I told you it was too early in the year for Spain.’

A tight ball of heat began to expand in Charlie’s chest. ‘You also said you didn’t want a long-haul flight.’ Olivia had suggested going away in June, to avoid what she called ‘hot-weather anxiety’. Charlie had thought it a good idea; the last thing she wanted was to have to watch her sister leap out of bed every morning at six, run to the window and howl, ‘I can’t see any sun yet!’ But Detective Inspector Proust had put the kaibosh on the plan. Too many people were going to be away in June, he’d said. There was Gibbs’s honeymoon, for a start. And before that Sellers had booked an illicit holiday with his girlfriend, Suki. The official story was that he was going away with CID on a residential team-building trip. Meanwhile his wife Stacey would be in Spilling, not unlikely to bump into Charlie, Simon, Gibbs, Proust—the people Sellers had told her he’d be swinging on ropes and crawling through mud with in the depths of the countryside. Charlie was amazed Sellers’ double life had lasted as long as it had, given that his lies were so ill-thought-out.

‘So you wouldn’t mind somewhere with no pool and no air conditioning? ’ said Charlie, suspicious of what appeared to be an easy solution. There had to be a catch.

‘I mind that it’s not sunny and I mind that it’s colder than it is in London.’ Olivia sat straight-backed on her bar stool, legs crossed. She looked elegant and disappointed, like a jilted spinster from one of those long, boring films Charlie hated, full of hats and sullied reputations. ‘But there’s nothing I can do about it, and I’m certainly not going to sit by an outdoor pool in the pissing rain.’ Her eyes lit up suddenly. ‘Was there anywhere with a nice indoor pool? And a spa? A spa’d be great! I fancy one of those dry floatation treatments.’

Charlie’s heart plummeted. Why couldn’t everything have been perfect, just this one time? Was that too much to ask? No one was more fun to be with than Olivia, if the conditions were right.

‘I didn’t look,’ she said. ‘But I think it’s unlikely, unless you want to spend a small fortune.’

‘I don’t care about money,’ Olivia was quick to say.

Charlie felt as if there was a coiled spring inside her, one she had to keep pushing down or else it’d leap up and destroy everything. ‘Well, unfortunately, I have to care about money. So unless you want me to look for two separate hotels . . .’

Olivia was less well off than Charlie. She was a freelance journalist and had a colossal mortgage on a flat in London’s Muswell Hill. Seven years ago she’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The operation to remove both ovaries and her womb had been immediate, and had saved her life. Ever since, she’d been throwing money around like the spoiled child of aristocrats. She drove a BMW Z5 and took taxis from one side of London to another as a matter of course. Getting the Tube was one of the many things she claimed to have given up forever, along with compromising, ironing and wrapping presents. Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep, Charlie worried about her sister’s financial situation. It had to involve a lot of debt—an idea Charlie hated.

‘If we can’t do the hotel thing properly, I’d rather do something completely different,’ said Olivia, after mulling it over for a while.

‘Different?’ Charlie was surprised. Olivia had vetoed, quite unambiguously, any form of self-catering on the grounds that it was too much effort, even after Charlie had said she’d do any shopping and cooking that was required. As far as Charlie was concerned, making some toast in the morning and a salad at lunchtime was not hard work. Olivia ought to try doing Charlie’s job for a day or two.

‘Yes. Camping, or something.’

‘
Camping?
This from the woman who wouldn’t go to Glastonbury because the toilet paper isn’t folded into a point by a maid?’

‘Look, it’s not my preferred option. A nice hotel in Spain in June, in the heat, was what I wanted. If I can’t have that, I’d rather not have some sad mockery of my ideal. At least camping’s meant to be shit. You go there expecting to sleep on some mud, under some cloth, and eat packets of dried food . . .’

‘I’m sure you’d dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the West from
The Wizard of Oz
if you ever tried to go camping.’

‘What about Mum and Dad’s, then? We haven’t been there together for ages. Mum’d wait on us hand and foot. And they’re always asking me when I’m next coming, with just a trace of disinheritance in their voices.’

Charlie pulled a face. Her and Olivia’s parents had recently retired to Fenwick, a small village on the Northumberland coast, and developed an obsession with golf that was at odds with the game’s leisurely image. They behaved as if golf were their full-time job, one they might be fired from if they weren’t diligent enough. Olivia had been to their club with them once, and she’d reported to Charlie afterwards that Mum and Dad had been about as relaxed as drugs mules in front of airport customs officials.

Charlie didn’t think she had the stamina to cope with all three members of her immediate family at the same time. She could not reconcile the concept of parents with the concept of holiday. Still, it was ages since she’d last made the trip up north. Perhaps Olivia was right.

The barman turned up the volume of the music. It was still Rod Stewart, but a different song: ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’. ‘I love this one,’ he said, winking at Charlie. ‘I’ve got a “Rod is God” T-shirt, me. I normally wear it, but I’m not wearing it today.’ He looked down at his chest, apparently bemused.

The combination of Rod Stewart and the tartan wallpaper gave Charlie an idea. ‘I know where we can go,’ she said. ‘How do you feel about flying to Scotland?’

‘I’ll fly anywhere that’s got a nice holiday to offer. But why Scotland?’

‘We’d be near enough to Mum and Dad to go to theirs for a lunch or two, but we wouldn’t have to stay with them. We could down our roast dinners and escape . . .’

‘To where?’ asked Olivia.

‘Someone at work gave me this card for a holiday chalet place . . .’

‘Oh, for God’s sake . . .’

‘No, listen. It sounded good.’

‘It’ll be self-catering.’ Olivia made a squeamish face.

‘The card said home-cooked meals are available if you want them.’

‘Three times a day? Breakfast, lunch and dinner?’

How was it possible to need a stiff drink even while you held one in your hand, even as you were throwing it down your neck in large gulps? Charlie lit another cigarette. ‘Why don’t I phone and ask? Honestly, Liv, it sounded really good. All beds super-king size, that sort of thing. Luxury chalets, the card said.’

Olivia laughed. ‘You’re a marketing man’s dream, you are. Everything calls itself “luxury” these days. Every flea-bitten B&B, every—’

‘I’m pretty sure it said spa facilities too,’ Charlie cut her off.

‘That’ll mean a derelict shed with a cold puddle in it. I doubt they offer dry-floatation treatments.’

‘You want to dry-float? Why don’t we go upstairs and I’ll hurl you off our balcony?’ Didn’t they say that all the best jokes had an undertone of seriousness?

‘You can’t blame me for being a bit cautious.’ Olivia looked Charlie up and down as if she’d just met her for the first time. ‘Why should I trust you when you’re quite plainly mad?’ She lowered her voice to a fierce whisper. ‘You made up a boyfriend!’

Charlie looked away, blew a smoke ring into the air. Why did she feel a compulsion to tell her sister everything she did, even knowing perfectly well the flak she’d get?

‘Did you give him a name?’ asked Olivia.

‘I don’t want to talk about it. Graham.’

‘
Graham?
Jesus!’

‘I’d had a bowl of Golden Grahams for breakfast that morning. I was too knackered to be imaginative.’

‘If I adopted the same approach, I’d be going out with apple-and-cinnamon Danish. Did Simon believe you?’

‘I don’t know. I think so. He didn’t seem very interested one way or the other.’

‘Does Graham have a surname? Semi-skimmed Milk, perhaps?’

Charlie shook her head, smiling half-heartedly. The ability to laugh at oneself was supposed to be a virtue. It was one Olivia expected Charlie to practise rather too often.

‘Nip it in the bud as soon as you get back,’ Olivia advised. ‘Tell Simon it’s over with Graham. Rejoin the world of the sane.’

Charlie wondered if Simon had said anything to Sellers and Gibbs. Or, God forbid, to Inspector Proust. Everybody in CID saw her as a romantic disaster area. They all knew how she felt about Simon, and that he’d rejected her. They knew she’d slept with more people in the past three years than most of them had in their lives.

Charlie was already attached to her lie, to the new status and dignity it afforded her. She wanted Simon to think she had a proper boyfriend. Not just another of her hopeless one-night stands—a relationship that might last. Like a grown-up.

She hadn’t told Olivia about Alice Fancourt and Simon. It depressed her too much. Why was Simon thinking about Alice suddenly, after nearly two years of no contact? What good could come of seeing her again now? Charlie had assumed he had forgotten about Alice, or was in the process of doing so. It wasn’t as if anything had even happened between them.