Beautiful Liars. Isabel Ashdown

slip on the frosty bank, and she feels herself disappear into the water, fish-like herself, the ice closing up behind her.

      It’s a dream she’s had before, or at least a version of it. Sometimes she’s the one on the bicycle, and it’s Juliet and Liv sitting on the wooden bench, eating sandwiches. Other times she’s watching, helpless, as Juliet floats by, trapped under ice, her eyes wild. And then there’s the version where nothing happens; where Martha roams back and forth along that lonely path, looking, looking, looking, and finding nothing—seeing nothing, hearing nothing. In some ways, that’s the worst dream of them all, infected as it is with the intangible qualities of helplessness and guilt.

      I should have walked on with her, Martha tells herself, running her hands up and over her sleep-softened face, willing herself to rise from her position on the sofa, where she had sunk into sleep within moments of arriving home this evening. If Martha had walked on with her that night as she’d planned to—if she hadn’t changed her mind and left her standing on that towpath alone—would Juliet be alive today?

      She’s been in the library all afternoon, going back over old newspaper articles about Juliet’s disappearance, rereading the media speculation, the sound-bite quotes from “close sources.” Her head is full of it, the loose ends and unasked questions pressing against the inside of her mind, and she fears she is destined to dream of Juliet forever, at least until she finds the answers she seeks.

      Wrung out, she glances around her living room, a study in contemporary design: a dash of minimalism here, a nod to the Baroque there. When she’d signed the papers, Martha hadn’t even asked about the décor—it was enough to know it would be new, stylish, and easy to care for. Safe. It’s a gated community of sorts, the kind Martha would once have scorned as pretentious, but she likes it: She’s grateful to be locked in and secure. It’s a long way from the damp-curled rooms of her childhood home in Hackney, social housing long since demolished to make way for gentrification. The clock on the far wall tells her it’s nine-thirty p.m. God, she’ll never sleep now, she knows. She’s been out cold for nearly two hours.

      When her mobile rings, Martha cries out, and without thinking she grabs it from the side table, bringing it to her ear with a brusque “Hello?”

      There’s a rustling sound at the other end, the suggestion that the caller has dropped the phone and is trying to retrieve it. “Shit,” the voice says, gravelly, fumbling, his breath labored and apologetic as he finally sorts the handset out. “Shit. Sorry, Martha. Shit.”

      Dread sinks through her like a weight. Why didn’t she check the caller ID before answering? She finds herself frozen, much as she had been in her dream, the sense of helplessness returning like a memory, and her words won’t come. Outside, the city roars past and the world keeps turning, life continuing on as ever.

      “Martha?” At first his tone is soft and persuasive, but it takes only seconds for impatience to materialize, to betray itself as the stronger emotion. “Come on, love,” he says, and his words are mashed. Drunk. Growing singsong nasty. “I kno-ow you’re the-ere. I can hear you. I can hear the traffic. I can hear you breathing. Martha? Martha? Martha! Answer me, you hard-nosed cow!”

      At his roar she snaps into movement, jerking the receiver from her ear and pressing the red end-call button. It’s been months since she last heard from him, a year even. What does he want with her? She made it clear she was done with him, done with that chapter in her life. She’d given him money, hadn’t she? More than enough to set himself up, to make his own way. What more could he possibly want from her?

      * * *

      The following morning Martha and Toby are meeting at the café in the British Library, and when she arrives five minutes early she finds him already seated at a wall table with two coffees steaming in front of him. She started the day in a bad mood, having heard from Juney that they’re still unable to establish the name of the girl at the center of David Crown’s school allegation, as it was never formally reported on at the time. Apparently no public records exist. Surely it shouldn’t be so difficult to get this kind of information? How hard has Juney actually tried? But perhaps Martha is being unfair: How can she expect Juney to access information that doesn’t exist in the public domain? For that, Martha needs an insider. Perhaps it’s time to call in a few favors. She’ll phone Finn Palin when she’s finished here, see what he can do for her. Of course, he’s retired now, but Martha knows how the old boys’ network operates inside the police force; she’s certain he’ll be able to track down that girl’s name without too much fuss. He owes her that much at least.

      Toby rises as she approaches, and she hates him for arriving ahead of her.

      “I take mine decaffeinated,” she says, nodding toward the drinks as she removes her winter gloves. The wall lights cast a clean pool of white around him, like a halo, and she catches an amused look on his face as he clocks the spotty Dalmatian print of her gloves before she stuffs them in her bag.

      “Decaf?” Toby replies. “That’s what I ordered.” He’s unflustered, unflappable, gently pushing the white cup across the small table and taking his seat. “I got us a flapjack to share too—in case you’re hungry?”

      Martha could eat a horse, having skipped breakfast to make it here on time, but still she shakes her head. God, she hates herself sometimes.

      Giving no acknowledgment of her bad attitude, Toby places the case files on the table between them and flips open his reporter’s notebook to reveal a page annotated with small, neat handwriting. He pushes at his floppy fringe. “Well, I’ll save you half anyway—in case you get peckish. So,” he says, taking a sip of his drink, “yesterday seemed to go quite well, don’t you think? The production meeting. I reckon Glen Gavin has put together a really good team—Juney is an excellent researcher. She’s given us quite a lot of useful stuff already.”

      Us. Jeez. Out of the Cold is not some kind of bloody partnership; Martha is the lead on this project. Toby Parr is her deputy. He’ll get what, five or ten minutes of airtime if he’s lucky, and here he is behaving as though he’s her copresenter rather than some pipsqueak who’s been foisted upon her by management. She eyes him coldly, trying to unbalance him, willing him to drop his cheery posh-boy mask and show what he really thinks of her. That she’s just an estate girl made good, a poorly educated nobody to clamber across on his trouble-free, well-heeled way to the bloody top.

      “Can you give me a summary of what we’ve got so far?” she asks him. It’s a test, and from his change in expression he knows it.

      “OK.” He pulls his notebook closer, studies it for a moment. “First off, Juney has been in touch with the Metro, to place that “Can You Help?” ad you drafted. Should go in tomorrow at the latest, to run for five days.”

      “Good. I don’t hold out much hope of anyone useful coming forward, but you never know.”

      Toby returns to his notes. “To summarize: We have Juliet Sherman, age seventeen, goes missing at around nine p.m. on a Friday night in January 2000, on a towpath beside the Regent’s Canal. Last-known person to see her alive is you, Martha Benn, seventeen-year-old school friend. That evening she’d also been with your mutual friend Olivia Heathcote and her own brother, Tom Sherman, at the Waterside Café bar, where you’d all had two, maybe three alcoholic drinks before Juliet had to leave for her voluntary job at Square Wheels. You walked with her along the canal, with your bicycles—it was dark, but lamplit—halfway to the Square Wheels cabin, before leaving her to walk the remainder alone as you returned to the bar for your forgotten bag. The roads nearby were fairly busy, with it being a Friday night, and you said you saw a number of other walkers and cyclists along the path and that Juliet was in good spirits when you parted. As far as we know, no one else saw or spoke to her before she disappeared, but we don’t believe she can have gone much farther, because her bicycle was found the next day only meters from the spot where you’d parted. The person of interest is David Crown, leader of Square Wheels and local landscape gardener, who vanished a day after Juliet went missing, having withdrawn a large sum of money. Ultimately, the police concluded that Juliet and David had been involved in a secret affair and that they left together of their own accord.”