Beautiful Liars. Isabel Ashdown

hovering over the message for one delicious, tantalizing moment of hesitation, enjoying the pain, before I click Open.

      6

      Martha

      The e-mail from Liv had taken Martha by surprise yesterday morning. She hadn’t expected a reply so quickly—Liv’s family might have moved on from her childhood address long ago—but the pleasure of the quick response had been dulled slightly by its formal tone. Martha had at least thought she might recognize something more of the old Liv in it. Olivia Heathcote had been the joker of their group, the one most likely to swear and tell dirty jokes and scribble graffiti on the toilet walls at school. She was the daring one, the chancer, the one who had made her and Juliet take themselves less seriously.

      Liv’s family had been big and noisy, a world of difference from the hushed void that was Martha’s home after her mother’s departure. Liv had complained endlessly about lack of privacy, having to share with an older sister, and then—the horror—having to give up her bed for a confused grandmother who called out in the night as Liv slept on the camp bed across the room. “In the pantry!” Nanna had taken to shouting in the night. “The eggs are in the pantry with the plums!” Liv’s impersonations were hysterical; every morning as they walked to school, she’d update Martha and Juliet on the previous night’s nocturnal wakings, clutching at their sleeves and rolling her head back in a pose of fitful sleep. “Me smalls are on the line!” she’d shriek. “I’ll ’ave ’is guts for garters if ’e don’t sort the sink out!” Sometimes Liv’s stories could leave Martha and Juliet gasping for breath, the joy of their laughter enough to eclipse the loneliness Martha had left a few streets away in Stanley House. Thank God for Liv and her crazy family.

      “Gordon Bennett,” she groaned one morning in a mimic of her mother. “The twins are toilet training at the moment. Mum left Frankie on the potty while she made the porridge, but he got off it when her back was turned and laid one down on the bottom step of the stairs.”

      ‘No!” Juliet and Martha screamed, neither of them having experience of so big a family.

      “All of a sudden Nanna shouts from the hall, ‘Joyce! What the ’ell are you feeding them? Could’ve broke my neck on it! Slippery as a whelk!’ Right up between her toes, it was. Dad had to leave his breakfast half eaten, he was retching that bad.”

      Martha recalls having to stop on a bench, laughing so hard she thought she would actually wet herself, and the three of them sat for a while, catching their breath and sighing before sprinting the rest of the way to school to avoid missing the bell. Slippery as a whelk became their catchphrase, to be called out to one another over the toilet cubicles at school, a code for anything stinky or ugly or grim. When cauliflower cheese was on the canteen menu, Liv would make vomit fingers at it, silently mouthing, “Slippery as a whelk.” When Gina Norris brought her ugly little baby to show off outside the school gates in Year Eleven, the three of them whispered to one another that only a mother could love a face like that, what with it being “as slippery as a whelk.”

      Martha misses that laughter, the camaraderie of a well-worn joke, the ability to communicate with another human being in so few words. There’s only her and Liv now; surely they owe it to each other to rekindle their friendship? She can’t have forgotten, can she? Not when they shared so much. Liv and Juliet were more than just her best friends; they were the closest thing she had to family.

      The message had come through during Martha’s meeting with Toby yesterday, and she’d had to read it over several times, hardly able to believe she was so easily back in contact with her old friend. When Toby had returned with their coffees she’d handed him her phone, inviting him to read it too. “That’s great,” he’d said, and at the time she had agreed, yes, it was great that Liv was happy to help them. But something had unsettled her all the same. She supposed it wasn’t unimaginable that Liv’s formality was simply her unease making its way into her written words. Certainly, Liv would be shaken up by her letter, so it was natural her tone might be a bit off-key. But did Liv harbor any ill feeling toward Martha? Their relationship had all but evaporated with the disappearance of Juliet; was it possible that Liv held Martha in some way responsible? Or was this just Martha’s own guilt rearing itself, making her question herself and everyone around her?

      She had slept on it, and by the time she rose at five this morning she’d got it straight in her head. Of course Liv sounded different: eighteen years was a lifetime ago. I’ve changed, Martha told herself. Liv has changed. Everything has changed. She had tapped out a brief response, purposely warming up her own tone, trying to inject something of their old dynamic into her words:

      Liv! So great to hear from you! I can’t tell you how relieved I am that my letter found you. So you’re a bereavement counselor now? Wow, that really is impressive, though it doesn’t surprise me at all. You always were a good listener. Totally understand about your work commitments, so yes, why don’t I put together some starter questions and send them over to you in the next day or two? Perhaps we could meet up when you’re back in the country? Mart xx

      Mart. No one but Liv and Juliet ever called her Mart. She hated it if anyone else tried to abbreviate her name in the same way; it sounded overfamiliar coming from anyone but her best friends. With them it had been different. Olivia was Liv, Juliet was Jules, and Martha was Mart. Martha feels reality tip every time she allows herself to voyage deeper into the memories of that era, and her breath catches as the train she’s now traveling on comes to a halt and Toby nudges her to get off.

      Toby has made contact with Juliet’s father, and together Martha and he have taken the Northern line as far as Archway, following Toby’s mobile app to navigate the twenty minutes to Mr. Sherman’s new home on foot. It’s a ground-floor flat on a good terraced street, but not a patch on the nice detached place Juliet’s family owned when the girls were growing up. Martha feels a rush of relief that they made the decision to hold off on the camera crew until they’d had this first interview with him; it would seem so wrong, turning up here mob-handed to rake over his tragic past. Martha has been dreading this meeting more than any of the others they hope to line up over the coming days. So far they have been able to establish that Mr. Sherman—Alan, as he asked to be called when Toby and he spoke on the phone yesterday—took a sabbatical from his work as a bank manager around five years after Juliet’s disappearance to return to the family home and care for his ex-wife. It was a late diagnosis of breast cancer, for which she refused any kind of treatment, and so after four months Mr. Sherman had found himself a widower of sorts, living alone in a four-bedroom house with no income. A year later, the old family home had been sold, and he had moved here.

      “How did he sound to you?” Martha asks Toby as they stop outside the front door, her finger poised over the button labeled SHERMAN.

      “He sounded like a nice guy,” Toby replied, pushing at the roots of his hair. Martha suspects this is something he does when he feels uneasy. “But profoundly sad. Like a man who’s had years to become that way, if you know what I mean? Lonely, perhaps. He seemed happy to talk.”

      Martha presses the buzzer, and they wait for only a few seconds before Alan Sherman opens the door, shakes them by the hand, and gestures to the back of the hall, where the door to his flat stands open. Martha is struck by the reduced size of him. Her memory of him was as a tall man, straight-backed and broad-shouldered, always in a shirt and tie, even on weekends. She would never have recognized this man as Juliet’s father. This man is stooped, all-over gray, dressed in shapeless tan cords and a brown V-neck sweater, and as she walks along the hall she wonders if she can make out anything at all of the Mr. Sherman she once knew. It seems as though his illness has altered him almost beyond recognition. But when she enters his tidy little home and he closes the door softly behind them, he turns and she sees it there, unmistakable. The same haunted look in his eyes that she saw on their very last encounter, a day eighteen years ago when he’d stood on her doorstep, pleading with her to tell the police if she knew who Juliet had been seeing. To think that that look has never left him, that Juliet’s disappearance has haunted him across the years and lives on in him still.

      “We want to find out what happened to Juliet, Mr. Sherman,”