My Mother, The Liar: A chilling crime thriller to read with the lights on

After that Gran wouldn’t discuss it, and Amy had been warned on pain of death to ask her father about it. Even so, the story ate at her. The dead first wife became the antagonist in her nightmares and she’d had no choice but to find out what had happened.

When she was thirteen, she’d gone to the library and had mastered the mysteries of the microfiche machine and had read the reports of what her father was supposed to have done. It didn’t stand up in her mind: the words ‘frenzied attack’ in the same sentence as her father’s name were so incongruent she had laughed. Still did. In her imagination she had packed the whole thing away in the same box as her mother’s death. It was all in the mental filing cabinet labelled ‘Romantic Tragedies’ along with other things that were too difficult to think about very often.

As far as Amy was concerned, the fact that bodies had been found at The Limes proved that her dad was innocent beyond doubt. Whoever had been killing people in that house, it hadn’t been him. Whoever the killer was, they had more than likely framed him. Simple.

At least that’s what she believed on good days. That’s what she would tell someone if they asked. On not so good days, when the world felt full of impending doom, she saw it differently. She was torn then. Between what she wanted to believe and what her logical mind suggested to her. The conviction that her father was incapable of being a frenzied murderer was absolute, but the suspicion that he might be capable of great passion, immense rage and deep hurt created a worm of doubt that wriggled in her brain from time to time. She knew for a fact that he’d done anger management courses over the years. Yet he’d never once lost it with her.

All she could base her darker thoughts on were the facts that her father loved her with a devotion that bordered on obsession, and he still loved her mother. If Gran didn’t stay him, he would have locked his child in the house for life just so he could keep her safe. She wouldn’t just be wrapped in cotton wool; she would be buried in it.

He never had curbed her freedom but she could tell he wanted to. Only the voice of reason stopped him taking her to a desert island where she would be safe for ever. She knew he still loved her mother because he never talked about her, and if anyone asked him his face would cloud with hurt so intensely that no one dared ask him again. That couldn’t be anything else but love, could it?

If he had loved the first wife as much, would he have killed her rather than lose her to someone else? Amy knew for a fact that he would kill anyone who threatened her safety. He had said so often enough.

A few years before, she had shared her worries with her best friend Kayleigh. Kayleigh had said that the only way to find out if he had killed the first wife was to ask her via ‘spirit’. They had hidden themselves in Gran’s bedroom and made a Ouija board out of scrabble tiles and had invoked the spirit of Patsy. Gran’s room had been a good choice of venue – after all, how scary could anything be if it was experienced on a bed of quilted pink satin surrounded by kitten ornaments?

Bloody terrifying as it turned out. They had scared each other shitless.

Kayleigh had led the proceedings. Her mother owned a deck of Tarot cards and she was familiar with the ritual of such things, having been witness to many a prediction of handsome strangers and sudden windfalls. Kayleigh had laid the letters out in a circle and had written ‘yes’ and ‘no’ on two pieces of paper. On a third she had written ‘goodbye’. She’d placed them in the circle. In the middle, she put a glass tumbler.

They had debated the glass. It had a picture of Blackpool Tower on it and didn’t seem a serious enough object to use in the circumstances, but it was all they had to hand and neither of them thought that any restless spirit would be too concerned about a bit of kitsch. Kayleigh had said that any spirit manifesting in Delia’s bedroom would have to be oblivious to tat, otherwise they wouldn’t bother coming at all. Amy had laughed with her, but had felt mildly offended all the same.

They had both said the Lord’s Prayer, just in case, before each putting a tentative digit on the upturned glass. ‘Is anybody there?’ Kayleigh had asked, sounding like Boris Karloff in a bad horror film. Amy had nearly fainted when the glass started to move. She’d pulled her finger away, accusing Kayleigh of pushing it, which she strenuously denied, saying, ‘If you’re not going to take this seriously, I’m going home.’ There had been pouting and umbrage taken.

Amy had reassured her that she was deadly serious and they had tried again, watching as the glass propelled itself under their fingers. The first few words it spelled out were nonsense, not even real words. Only when Kayleigh asked for Patsy to communicate with them did anything significant happen.

‘Are you Patsy?’ Kayleigh asked the air.

Amy had shuddered as the glass moved towards the slip of paper bearing the word yes.

‘Were you murdered?’ was the next question. Again the glass moved to yes.

Kayleigh had stared at Amy, eyes wide. ‘Who murdered you?’

Amy had been barely able to breathe as the glass had moved around the circle in undecided moves, finally spelling out the words: ‘not him’.

‘See,’ Kayleigh had said, pleased with herself.

Scared and unconvinced, Amy had asked the question again, but nothing happened. The glass hesitated and quivered under their fingers. ‘Did my father kill you?’ she demanded, desperate for a reiteration that it wasn’t him.

The glass moved again, sweeping around the circle again and again in dramatic arcs, then stopping abruptly in front of the slip of paper, which said ‘goodbye’.

Unnerved by the experience, they had scooped the letters back into their little bag and shoved them back in the Scrabble box. They screwed up the notes Kayleigh had written and threw them into the bin. Kayleigh was convinced that Amy had conclusive proof that Charlie was not a murderer. Amy wanted to believe it but wasn’t sure. Her logical mind refused to allow her to accept that they had just communicated with a dead woman. But what else could it have been?

‘What’s up? You scared?’ Kayleigh had asked.

‘No,’ she’d lied. ‘I was just wondering, if we could do it again, see if we can talk to my mum?’

They had agreed to try it again the next time they had Gran’s house to themselves, probably Tuesday when Delia would be out at bingo again. They did, but absolutely nothing had happened at all. The glass hadn’t even attempted to move. Kayleigh had explained that it was because Rachel’s spirit was at rest. She had passed peacefully and wasn’t earthbound like Patsy.

Delia had put an end to any further forays into the paranormal. She had found the screwed-up words in her bedroom bin and had instantly worked out what they had been up to. Her attitude towards dabbling with the unknown had been expressed with enough fear and anger to dissuade Amy from trying it again for a very long time, especially when she had insisted that she couldn’t sleep soundly in that room afterwards.

Amy would never tell Delia whose spirit they had been trying to talk to, and suspected that her gran’s insistence that the bedroom was tainted by their activities was just an excuse to get Charlie to redecorate the other, larger room and move her things in there. Delia had even gone so far as to burn the Scrabble game – just in case it was tainted too. Her gran could be strange sometimes.

Amy hadn’t kept in touch with Kayleigh, not since they had left school and gone their separate ways. She missed her. There was no one else she could be as open with, or who knew so many of her secrets. However, given her experience with Nick Gribble, maybe that was a good thing. The less people knew about her, the better.

***

The bus finally arrived and she climbed aboard behind the iTunes idiot and found a seat at the back. She tried her dad’s number again, just to let him know she was on her way home. The call went straight to voicemail.

When she finally made it home she found the house quiet, dark and empty. Her first task was to turn on all the downstairs lights, then switch on the TV and crank up the heating, if only to drive the shadows and dark thoughts away.

She had half hoped to find a note from her father explaining where he was, but he hadn’t been expecting her home until the weekend. It was an irrational desire on her part, yet she was disappointed. ‘You are not the centre of the universe, Amy,’ she said, speaking out loud as if the sound of the words would have a greater chance of admonishing her selfishness than if she’d merely thought them.

For one lonely moment, she thought about ringing Gran but would have to explain why she’d been sent home in disgrace. It wasn’t worth the hassle. Instead, she wandered out into the kitchen and began to rummage in the cupboards for something to eat. She found a pot noodle lurking at the back of the cupboard, but rejected it on the grounds that appealing as it was in principle, it would taste of reconstituted cardboard. They always did. Eventually she settled for a microwave pizza.

She picked at it, nibbling at bits of the topping as she watched TV mindlessly, trying to decide whether to have a bath, or ring round to see if anyone wanted company. In the end, she decided to work on an essay, a case study on one of the patients at Tynings – the elderly care unit where she had her placement. Bill had been the wrong patient to choose in a way. She couldn’t examine his past as nobody knew about it.

He had been a street drinker until the police sectioned him and he was admitted to the unit. Then he had been diagnosed with Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, an alcohol-induced dementia. Because it was a rare diagnosis, he had seemed like an interesting case to study at the time; now that she had to produce fifteen thousand words on the man it was her worst choice ever. Bill wasn’t even a pleasant character – he was dirty, rude and he gave her the creeps. But it was too late to change now. The essay was due in a week and she would just have to make the best of it.

***

The doorbell rang, jolting her out of her reverie with the subtlety of a brick. A plump woman with a vaguely familiar face stood on the doorstep.

‘Sorry to bother you, love. Is Charlie in?’

‘He’s not in at the moment. I can get him to ring you when he gets back,’ she said politely. If your dad was a builder it wasn’t unusual to have neighbours you didn’t know banging on the door because they’d locked themselves out and wanted to borrow a ladder, or they had a leak, a blockage or some emergency they couldn’t fix themselves.

‘Oh no, don’t worry, I only wanted to drop this off to him – only I thought it might be important.’ She reached into her pocket and handed a broken SOS bracelet to Amy. ‘I think your mum must have dropped it when she had that fit in the café today, poor woman. I hope she’s feeling better now. Quite a thing to see when you’re having a quiet coffee of a morning and minding your own business!’ she said with a laugh. ‘I didn’t find it until after they’d gone or I would have given it to her then, but I remembered seeing your dad’s van parked on the drive so I thought I would drop it off on my way home. It’s lucky really – I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with it if I hadn’t recognised your dad. He did a lovely job on my sister’s extension. Anyway, I must be off. Hope your mum is better, love,’ she said as she waddled off down the drive.

‘Thanks,’ Amy said.

The word was so quiet, it wafted into the night unheard.

She shut the door and stared at the bracelet, puzzled. Perhaps the woman had the wrong Charlie Jones. But she couldn’t have – she’d said she recognised him. It dawned on her that maybe he did have a girlfriend, one he hadn’t told her about, one who had a habit of having fits in public places. Perhaps that was where he was now, in hospital with this sick woman – whoever she was. She pried open the bracelet to get a look at this woman’s details. If her dad had met someone, she had a right to know her name at least.

She had to look twice at the tiny piece of paper. The name inside the identity bracelet belonged to Rachel Jones, with the Jones crossed out and Porter scribbled in next to it. But it couldn’t be. That was the name of her mother, and her mother was dead.

This couldn’t be right.

The truth didn’t dawn – it hit her full pelt like a punch, leaving her reeling from the impact. She felt sick.

She threw the bracelet across the hall as if it was a toxic, physical lie. Staring at it she half hoped it would dematerialize and take itself away from her like it had never existed. But it remained on the bottom stair – tauntingly real.

The address had said Bayswater. She shook her head and went back into the lounge. She would prove this wrong. At most, this would be a coincidence. Her family couldn’t have lied to her about this. It wasn’t possible; they weren’t that cruel.

She had discovered that the internet was a wonderful thing a long time ago. You could find out pretty much anything if you knew where to look, and 192.com was a good place to start. All you needed was a name, and a vague idea of location, then you could find out someone’s phone number, address, and even whether they were registered to vote. Rachel Porter had no phone, but she was on the electoral roll. She did exist.

Amy still wasn’t quite convinced that this Rachel Porter was the same Rachel who had married her father and died in childbirth like the tragic heroine of her fantasies. There would have to be a death certificate, a record of her mother’s demise, and she knew exactly where to look. Her dad had a trunk at the end of his bed where he kept his personal things. If the evidence she needed was anywhere it would be in there. Dispassionately she headed for the stairs, fully prepared to break into his privacy without a second thought.