Those Who Lie: the gripping new thriller you won’t be able to stop talking about. Diane Jeffrey
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the fuck?!’
Philippa Stuart-Barnes has had a fondness for swear words for as long as Emily has known her. Her friend’s obscenities always sound at odds with her public school accent, to Emily’s ears, anyway.
Josephine sets the tray down on the coffee table a little harder than necessary, making the teaspoons jump as well as Pippa herself. She looks disapprovingly at Pippa over the top of her glasses.
‘Whoops. Sorry, Mrs Cavendish,’ Pippa says, clapping her hand over her mouth theatrically.
Josephine leaves the living room, her high-heeled shoes tapping on the wooden floor. Emily is suddenly cross that her mother wears shoes in the house. When she and Amanda were little, Josephine had always insisted that they remove theirs as soon as they came through the door.
Pippa takes the hand from her mouth to reveal a cheeky grin and tucks a wayward strand of her straight, dark hair behind her ear. With her other hand, she absent-mindedly rubs her pregnant belly.
Pippa’s flippancy annoys Emily, too. This is serious. For Emily, anyway. Then she reasons with herself. Pippa is just trying to provide her with a bit of light relief after the dramatic events of the last few days. But she is irascible today and Pippa will have a hard job lifting her spirits.
‘That’s like, weird, brah.’ This reaction is from Matt, who addresses everyone as ‘brah’, regardless of gender. He’s a handsome seventeen-year-old although his long, unkempt hair tones down his looks. He has striking, green-brown eyes. Emily can see they’re slightly bloodshot.
‘A message from Greg? That’s impossible!’ Amanda exclaims. ‘What did it say?’
Emily has the impression she’s observing this scene, rather than participating in it, and she doesn’t realise straight away that her sister is waiting for her to answer. ‘He said he didn’t know what was going on,’ she says. ‘He promised to get back to me as soon as possible.’
‘Weird,’ Matt repeats.
Emily turns towards her half-brother. ‘I know,’ she agrees.
‘What were the exact words? What time was the message sent?’ Amanda asks, pouring insipid tea from the pot into each of the four mugs in turn.
Emily notices her sister’s hands are unsteady.
‘Hang on, I’ll fetch my computer and you can see for yourself.’ Emily lifts Mr Mistoffelees off her lap and drops him to the floor, then pushes herself out of her armchair. She feels the familiar stabbing pain in her side. She winces.
‘I’ll go, Em,’ Pippa says. ‘Tell me where it is.’
‘In my bedroom. On the bookcase.’ Emily expects Matt or Amanda to offer to go as Pippa’s pregnant, but she has already left the room. Emily sits down again. She never knows whether to sit back in her chair or perch on the end of it; either way it’s uncomfortable. She opts for somewhere in between, although that’s no better.
For a while, no one speaks. The cat jumps straight back up and kneads Emily’s thighs with its claws as though punishing her for disturbing him before. Amanda hands out the mugs of tea. Emily catches Matt’s gaze sweeping her living room. She looks around the room herself, as if seeing it through his eyes. The flowers she has brought home from the hospital are wilting in a vase on the sideboard. Above it hangs a large painting, Blue Rotation, by a Hungarian artist whose work she adores. It provides the only colour in the living room.
Emily realises now with a start that it’s the only thing in the whole room she actually likes. It’s an inhospitable, minimally furnished room. There’s no TV set. There’s one in the lounge upstairs, but apart from a few series or dramas, neither she nor Greg ever watched much television. There are no books downstairs either, as Emily tends to read novels on her Kindle.
Amanda puts an end to the silence. ‘Mum, can we have some biscuits?’ she calls through to Josephine in the kitchen.
‘You didn’t say please, Mandy.’
Amanda can’t stand people using a diminutive of her name, which is, of course, why Matt always does.
‘Oh, shut up, Matthew,’ she growls, much to Matt’s amusement.
Similarly, no one ever calls Matt by his full name except Amanda. Their squabbling has always bewildered Emily. After all, it’s not as if they grew up together – Amanda had left home for university by the time Matt was born. Matt claims that it’s just good-natured bickering. Right now Emily finds their banter maddening. I really am in a foul mood. I must snap out of it, she thinks, reminding herself that they are here to support her.
A moment later, Josephine reappears, carrying a plate of biscuits that she hands to Amanda.
‘Thank you,’ Amanda says to Josephine as Matt leans over and helps himself to a chocolate Hobnob. Josephine leaves the room again without a word.
‘How strange!’ Emily says a few minutes later. She has booted up her Mac, which Pippa has brought downstairs for her, and she’s sitting with the computer on her lap. She can feel everyone else watching her as she stares in disbelief at the screen. ‘It’s gone.’
‘What’s gone?’ asks Amanda.
Emily looks up and meets her sister’s eyes. ‘The message on Facebook. The one Greg sent. It must have been deleted.’
‘Maybe you imagined it,’ Amanda says. ‘They were giving you some pretty strong medicine at the hospital. Perhaps it was hallucinogenic.’ She reaches over from where she’s sitting on the sofa, and pats Emily’s knee.
‘I was not hallucinating.’
‘Well, maybe the drugs were oneirogenic, then. Didn’t you say you’d fallen asleep on your bed?’
Emily thinks how much she hates it when her sister uses medical jargon, although she usually gets the gist. It goes with the job, she supposes.
‘Onner what?’ Clearly Matt hasn’t understood, though.
‘It’s from the Greek word oneiros meaning dream,’ Pippa explains. Matt looks vacantly at her. ‘Amanda means that Emily may have dreamt she received the message,’ she adds.
Emily is engulfed by a new surge of infuriation. Apart from Amanda, who seems to think this is all in her head, no one is taking her seriously. Emily looks from Pippa to Amanda to Matt. I want them to believe me. I need them to believe me. ‘It wasn’t a dream,’ she says, but she can hear her voice waver. She turns the laptop round towards her sister. ‘Look, here’s the obituary I posted.’
‘Well, the message isn’t there now, is it?’ Amanda says. ‘So you must either have dreamt it or imagined it.’ Amanda’s tone is soft, but her words seem harsh to Emily. ‘Anyway, Greg can’t possibly have sent you a message.’
‘He might have done,’ Matt says, his mouth full of biscuit. ‘Weirder things have happened.’
They all look at him. Emily thinks it would be just like Matt to suggest a message from beyond the grave. ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.
‘Well, it could be Greg, couldn’t it?’ Matt pauses, looking at each of them in turn and stroking his goatee. ‘What if he didn’t die?’
‘What the…?’ Pippa refrains from swearing this time.
But Matt has spoken the words Emily really wants to hear. She desperately wants to believe that there’s a chance her husband could still be alive. ‘Is that possible? I mean, I didn’t see his body,’ she says. ‘I was still in hospital on the day of his funeral.’ Thoughts race through her head. Perhaps Greg has just disappeared? Maybe he’s in some sort of trouble and has had to go into hiding?
‘Greg died, Em,’ Pippa says gently.
Emily’s heart and stomach seem to plummet inside her and it’s almost as if she has just found out about the accident all over again.