The Last Lie by Alex Lake

Author:Alex Lake [Alex Lake]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

iii

By seven p.m. there were six or seven reporters outside his door. He didn’t open it, but eventually he’d have to. Eventually he’d have to face them and their cameras and questions.

And Alfie didn’t want to.

He didn’t want his face in the papers, didn’t want people studying it for signs of grief or guilt and then looking at the photos of Pippa and Claire and thinking, Hmm, I saw that guy in a pub in Barnes with the first girl who disappeared.

He needed to stop that from happening. He picked up his phone and dialled Mick.

‘Alfie. Everything OK?’

‘Kind of,’ Alfie said. ‘Apart from the reporters outside the house.’

‘Those bastards,’ Mick said. ‘Splashing my girl’s business all over the newspapers. Making out she’s some kind of slut. It’s none of their fucking business.’

‘I know. But they’ll stay here all night.’

‘No they won’t,’ Mick said. ‘I’ll be right over.’

He was there an hour later. Alfie watched out of the bedroom window as he pulled up in a black cab – he hated Uber, he told Alfie once, couldn’t understand why anyone used it – and climbed out wearing a pair of wine-red cords and a Barbour jacket. His face was red and he looked like he wished he had a shotgun to go with his country clothes.

One of the reporters noticed him and the pack turned, sensing fresh, vulnerable meat.

Alfie smiled. Mick was hardly fresh, and he was very far from vulnerable.

‘Do you know Mr Daniels?’ one of the reporters shouted, his camera aloft. ‘Are you a relation?’

‘I think it’s the wife’s old man,’ someone else said, and he pushed towards Mick, intending to intercept him on the pavement.

Mick marched towards him.

‘You lot can fuck off,’ he bellowed. He grabbed the camera from the reporter’s hand and snatched it away.

‘Hey,’ the reporter said. ‘You can’t do that!’

He tried to grab the camera back, but Mick held it away from him. He’d played rugby until his mid-thirties and, although he was carrying some extra weight, he was still, underneath it, a powerful man.

And an angry, determined one.

He threw the camera hard on to the pavement. The lens snapped off and rolled into the street. He kicked the body into the wall of the house. Alfie was no camera engineer, but he was pretty sure the damage was terminal.

‘I just bloody did,’ Mick said, and advanced towards another reporter. ‘And I’ll do it again’

The reporter moved aside. Mick walked to the front door and rang the bell.

Alfie went down to let him in. As he approached the door he could hear his father-in-law.

‘You lot are a disgrace,’ he was shouting. ‘Do you ever think about that? A fucking disgrace.’

‘You owe me a camera!’ the reporter whose camera was now in pieces shouted. ‘You can’t treat me like this!’

‘You don’t like it?’ Mick said. ‘Poor you. You shouldn’t be hanging around harassing people. And next time I’m bringing some of my boys along with me and you’ll like it a lot less, you scumbags.’

Alfie opened the door.

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