Let Me Lie by Clare Mackintosh

Author:Clare Mackintosh [MACKINTOSH, CLARE]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2018-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-ONE

ANNA

Mark and Joan talk, but it’s as though I’m under water. Every now and then one of them shoots me a concerned look, before offering me tea, or wine, or why don’t you have a little sleep?

I don’t need to sleep. I need to understand what the hell is going on.

Where have my parents been for the last year? How did they fake their suicides so convincingly that no one suspected a thing? And – most importantly – why did they do it?

It doesn’t make sense. I’ve found no evidence of debts, no suggestion that my parents moved large amounts of money out of their accounts before they disappeared. When the wills were read, everything – more or less – came to me. Dad borrowed money for the business, but it was only after he died – and Billy fell apart – that the business started struggling. My parents weren’t bankrupt – they can’t have done this for financial reasons.

My head is spinning.

‘We need to talk,’ I say, when Joan’s out of the room.

‘We do.’ Mark’s face is serious. ‘After Christmas, once Mum’s gone home, let’s get a babysitter and go out for dinner. Have a proper talk about everything. I was thinking: the counsellor doesn’t have to be someone I know, if that’s what’s bothering you – I can get a recommendation.’

‘No, but—’

Joan comes back in. She’s holding a game of Scrabble. ‘I wasn’t sure if you had a set, so I brought mine. Shall we have a game now?’ She looks at me with her head cocked to one side. ‘How are you doing, love? I know it’s hard for you.’

‘I’m okay.’ Lying by omission; passing off my peculiar mood as a symptom of grief. Another Christmas without my parents. Poor Anna. She misses them so much.

I shuffle Scrabble letters around on the little tray in front of me, unable to see the patterns in even the simplest of words. What am I going to do? Should I call the police? I think of lovely, kind Murray Mackenzie and feel a fresh wave of shame. He believed me. The only person who admitted there was something not quite right. The only person who agreed my parents might have been murdered.

And all the time it was a lie.

‘Jukebox!’ Joan says. ‘Seventy-seven.’

‘Two words, surely?’

‘Definitely one.’

I tune out from their good-natured argument.

At various times over the last nineteen months, grief has been overtaken by another emotion.

Anger.

‘It’s completely normal to feel angry when a loved one dies,’ Mark said, during my first counselling session. ‘Particularly when we feel the person who died made an active choice to leave us.’

An active choice.

My hand – holding a letter E I picked from the pile in the middle of the table – starts to shake violently. I drop the letter onto the rack and push my hands into my lap, squeezing them between my knees. I have spent the last year actively ‘working through’ – to use Mark’s vocabulary – my anger over my parents’ suicides.

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