The Lies We Told by Camilla Way (epub read online books .txt) 📗

“Well, but she could have been lying,” Clara said desperately. “She could have made it up.”

“Yeah, she could have.”

“Okay, so . . .”

Jade shrugged. “Why would she lie about it? She was so certain, so sincere. You can usually tell, can’t you, when another woman’s lying to you? In the end the uni let him off with a warning. Typically, he got no comeback, apart from me dumping him, of course, and a reputation for being a pest, but the general feeling was ‘naughty old Luke, boys will be boys’ sort of thing. He continued to swear blind that the girl was lying and he certainly had no trouble getting another girlfriend after that. Let’s be honest—it’s the sort of thing that happens all the time, just the sort of shit women are expected to put up with, be flattered by, even.”

Clara thought about it. About a time at a party when she was a teenager, a lad she’d fancied buying her shot after shot after shot, then, later, things going too far, too quickly, him not taking no for an answer until she finally managed to push him off. She’d told no one, worried it had been her fault for leading him on. Jade was right that it happened all the time, in different forms. A friend who often slept with her boyfriend when she didn’t feel like it because she couldn’t stand his endless moods if she didn’t, the time Zoe had been hit on by her flirty boss, who’d then made her life miserable when she’d turned him down. They were ordinary men, not monsters leaping out of bushes: friends, boyfriends, colleagues, getting drunk, getting carried away. A bit selfish. A bit entitled.

She remembered the e-mails Luke had been sent. Women are nothing to you, are we Luke? We’re just here for your convenience, to fuck, to step over, to use, or to bully. We’re disposable. You think you’re untouchable. . . . Think again.

“Did you tell the police about this?” she asked.

Jade shifted in her seat, looking slightly uncomfortable. “No, it’s not something I like to dwell on. And there’s no way it would have anything to do with Luke going missing now, so I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“Can you remember the girl’s name?” she asked.

“Of course. How could I forget? Her name was Ellen. Ellen Michaels. We have a few Facebook friends in common from our uni days, and I saw that she’d got married recently, in fact. She’s living in Hong Kong now.” Jade was silent for a bit. “I wonder if she thinks about it ever, about what happened with Luke.”

—

“So, what did Jade say?” Mac asked her later that evening. “Anything interesting?”

They were slumped on his sofa, picking at a stir-fry she’d made for them. And to her own surprise, Clara found herself saying, “No. Not really. Bit of a waste of time, to be honest.”

He nodded. “That’s a shame. So who’s next on the list?”

“A couple of his old colleagues,” she said vaguely. “I’ll get on to them tomorrow.”

She realized that she couldn’t quite face telling Mac what Jade had told her. He would, she knew, be as horrified and shocked as she was, yet she also knew that his loyalty to Luke might lead him to defend his friend, suggest that the girl was exaggerating perhaps, or even making it up, and though part of her was desperate to believe that, to be persuaded that the person she had loved for three years was incapable of behaving so badly, she also couldn’t quite face hearing it brushed aside, denied, or disbelieved either. She watched as Mac got up and began to clear the plates away, and when he smiled at her, she smiled too, before turning back to the TV.

She thought about Luke, about his exuberance, his easy charm, how she and Mac had always laughed at how luck seemed to follow him wherever he went, how he always seemed to get what he wanted, always came out on top. It suddenly didn’t seem so funny anymore. She thought about Amy and Jade and Ellen and the way Luke had treated them. Excuses could be made, of course. He was young and frightened when he’d got Amy pregnant. Perhaps Ellen had been exaggerating. Why, then, did she feel so utterly sick to her stomach? Again she thought of the e-mails Luke had been sent. You think you’ve got away with it. Think again, Luke.

Who’d sent that e-mail? She was pretty certain it was neither of the women she’d met over the past few days. The woman, Ellen, who’d made the accusation at university was living in Hong Kong now with a new baby, according to her check-ins and photos on Facebook, so was unlikely to be driving Luke around Britain in a stolen van. And Amy hardly seemed like a revenge-crazed psychopath either. She felt drained by the impossibility of it—there could be countless more women that Luke had wronged in some way, women she had no hope of knowing about, let alone tracking down. It was hopeless.

NINETEEN

LONDON, 2017

A few days after they’d met at the bar, Emily contacted Clara again, asking if she could meet her somewhere private. And though she was elated to hear from her, Clara’s heart sank when she realized that the only possible place she could take her to was her own flat—Mac, after all, was not supposed to know about their meeting. The memory of her last visit there—that strange, eerie sense of being watched, the sudden, terrifying burst of music exploding down the stairwell—still haunted her, and she sat for a long moment in Mac’s living room staring down at Emily’s message before she finally typed her reply.

She was grateful the following afternoon as she let herself into her building that Emily had at least agreed to meet in daylight. When she reached her door, she paused