Someone is Lying, page 1
About the Author
Heidi Perks is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Now You See Her, which was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, Come Back for Me, Three Perfect Liars, The Whispers, The Other Guest and The Last Resort. Someone is Lying is her seventh novel. Heidi is a voracious reader of crime and thrillers and is fascinated by the darker side of our closest relationships. Heidi lives in Bournemouth with her husband and two children.
Praise for Heidi Perks
‘Slick, gripping and compelling’ Lisa Jewell
‘Gripping’ Claire Douglas
‘Kept me up late into the night …’ Lucy Clarke
‘Reads like Liane Moriarty at her Big Little Lies best’ Tony Parsons
‘I was knocked for six by the twist in this book’ Rosamund Lupton
‘Terrifically suspenseful and intriguing’ Liz Nugent
‘Whip-smart twists’ Chris Whitaker
‘Beautifully written’ Gilly Macmillan
Also by Heidi Perks
Now You See Her
Come Back for Me
Three Perfect Liars
The Whispers
The Other Guest
The Last Resort
Heidi Perks
* * *
SOMEONE IS LYING
For Chris Bradford
Thank you – I could not have written any of my books without you
Prologue
12 July
The body isn’t found for eight days. Or at least this is the conclusion Inspector Santos Melo and his team come to. They estimate she has been lying in the undergrowth for over a week, although probably not as long as two. And all because no one had been looking for her.
Melo shakes his head in dismay, pulling back and straightening up. Beside him, on the roadside, the new young lad whose name he can’t remember looks pale, as if he is about to throw up at any moment. He’s been thrown in at the deep end on his first day, much like Melo had been twenty-odd years back. This will be a case the youngster won’t forget in a hurry, and Melo wonders how he will process it. Whether this young woman’s face will claw its way into the boy’s head at night so that she’s the last thing he sees before he closes his eyes.
Melo walks away. He can’t think of the lad right now, he has his own nightmares to consider. He’ll have to answer how she’s been here all this time, right under their noses.
He glances around at the tape that is being strung up, cordoning off the area into a crime scene. It makes the job easier when they are on a track like this that barely attracts any traffic or passers-by. Not one other vehicle has passed since they got here, even though they are only a stone’s throw from the bustle of Lisbon’s centre. But, then again, this is also the reason she hadn’t been found sooner.
In other circumstances he’d think it most likely the job of someone who knows the area, a local, someone they might even already have on their list. But not today. His mind is racing ahead to what they have missed, what he had missed.
‘Achas que ela foi movida?’ he asks. Do you think she has been moved?
‘Sim. Talvez não muito longe.’ Yes. Maybe not far though.
So she had likely been killed nearby, possibly dragged into the hedgerow, hidden under foliage that wasn’t completely covering her. He isn’t sure whether time gradually destroyed a shallow grave or if she was dumped here in a hurry.
Melo pulls his phone out of his pocket and taps onto his recent calls, pausing when he comes to the English woman he had last spoken to the day before and each one before that since she walked into his station in Lisbon’s city centre last week.
He pulls in a tight breath and hesitates before pressing on her number. It rings twice before she answers. He can tell by the way she speaks, by the crack in her voice as she says Hello? that she knows it is him on the other end of the line. She’s probably programmed his number in. She’s been waiting for this call. For the inevitable.
An image of his own teenage daughter flashes in Melo’s head. His sweet Ana. As soon as he comes off this call, he is going to ring her, check she is okay and that she is where she’s supposed to be, at her friend’s house. His heart strains at the thought of Ana’s eyes, blue and alive, the way she’d laughed at breakfast as she read him a joke someone had sent her. They had lit up in the starkest of contrasts to those of the young dead girl lying only feet from him, whose glassy stare is still visible.
He does not want to have this conversation with the English woman who had been pestering him to find her daughter only a week ago. He saw her pain the moment he met her, it was so palpably raw. She had lived through loss already, her daughter was her life – or at least these were the things he surmised.
Now he cannot bear to consider how he brushed off her worries and told her she had nothing to be concerned about. Where had his head been at? Because it certainly was not on his job. If he had been doing it properly, he would have started a search seven days ago.
People’s lives can change, flick out like a light in an instant. He has seen it too many times to count in his line of work he thinks as he reluctantly starts the conversation. ‘Mrs Adams …?’ he begins.
GONE: true crime podcast
Lucy Hawes
EPISODE 105: THE SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE OF ISSIE ADAMS AND DYLAN WHITING
PART ONE
Hi, listeners, I’m Lucy Hawes. Welcome to another session of GONE, my true crime podcast.
Today’s episode is a little different, for reasons that will become clear. I don’t usually delve into cases that are so recent, but this is the story of the two British teenagers who disappeared while travelling in Europe at the beginning of this summer, less than two months ago.
There are a number of reasons why I’ve chosen to cover the disappearance of Issie Adams and Dylan Whiting. These range from the strange circumstances in which they vanished, to the police’s handling of the case, and, as we’ll come onto, how the teenagers’ mothers dealt with the situation.
The couple’s disappearance generated very little media attention when they were first reported missing. That, in itself, felt strange. These are two British, good-looking, young people who went off for a summer of travelling and then simply disappeared.
But maybe not so unlikely when we consider the fact that, in the UK alone, someone is reported missing every ninety seconds. Pretty astonishing, isn’t it? That, in the time it takes to listen to my podcast, around forty new missing person cases will have been reported.
It’s probably heartening to point out that many of these people will be found alive, and pretty quickly. But there are more than six hundred people from around the world who vanish every day without trace. Who aren’t found. Whose loved ones might never know what happened to them.
Let’s take a look at what happened to Issie and Dylan. From the day Issie was reported missing to where we are now, it is a case that has thrown out twist after twist, and will leave you asking: what actually happened in Portugal this summer?
On the fifteenth of June, seventeen-year-old Issie Adams and her boyfriend of ten months, Dylan Whiting, aged nineteen, took a flight from London Gatwick to Madrid. The couple set off on their adventure with a vague itinerary but no concrete plans of where they were heading, or for how long, evident by the fact they had no return flights or hotels pre-booked.
Over the next three weeks they travelled west towards the coast of Spain, before heading south through Vigo, and making their way into Portugal, where they stopped briefly in Porto, finally arriving in Lisbon on the third of July.
It isn’t known why they chose to take this route. It isn’t necessarily a natural trek for backpackers through Europe, and, because they hadn’t laid out any plans, no one knows where they were intending to go after Lisbon.
But Issie had promised to let her mother, Jess Adams, know every time they arrived in a new place, and had been doing so up until the point this story begins. At six fifteen on the evening of the third of July, Issie Adams messaged her mum to say they had arrived in Lisbon and intended to spend a few nights there.
That afternoon, she posted a handful of pictures on her Instagram account, commenting that she and Dylan were having a wonderful time. Her final post showed them standing in front of the Belém Tower, on the bank of the Tagus River. Issie wrote: Here in Lisbon. Beautiful city with my gorgeous boyfriend. So lucky. Can’t wait to celebrate my eighteenth birthday with him the day after tomorrow … eek!
A happy moment in time captured on social media before the pair seemingly vanished into thin air, and her earlier message to her mother was to be the last time Jess Adams heard from her daughter.
After this Jess was unable to make contact with Issie, despite a series of texts and phone calls, making her instantly concerned when, as Issie had stated in her post, she turned eighteen two days later. Despite numerous attempts to make contact with Issie on the fifth of July to wish her a happy birthday, she was unable to. And, it appeared, neither could anyone else. Issie’s phone was switched off.
With Issie not responding to any birthday texts or calls, Jess Adams understood something had to be gravely wrong. And as the next forty-eight hours unfolded, things were only set to worsen.
Part One
Jess
CHAPTER ONE
4 July
Issie’s birthday – 5 July – had always fallen in the school term, or at least it had when it wasn’t a year of GCSEs or A levels. We used to joke when she was younger that if she lived in the States where her dad was from, everyone would be celebrating the eve
Once he had gone I avoided conversations that involved America, which was no mean feat when Issie’s television viewing mostly centred around American high schools and she dropped in words like ‘trash’ and ‘sidewalk’ like they were the norm.
The year she turned sixteen and had taken her GCSEs she wasn’t in school for her birthday and so Issie and I had flown to Crete for a week in the sun to celebrate. We made it back home the day before so she could spend it with friends. That was perfect. We were happy, tanned, and full of expectation for the long, lazy days of summer ahead of us.
Every year they were changing – the holidays never stayed the same as Issie grew older. I’d feared the teenage years and yet ended up loving them. Picnics, and buckets and spades, had been swapped for bodyboards. Digging holes in the sand soon made way for shivering in cold water up to my thighs as she attempted to stand on a surfboard. I was the mother who did everything with her because there was no other option. Scott had chosen to live the other side of the Atlantic, there was no one else. So I dived into it head first, soaking up the memories. Not regretting a single moment of being there for her.
The summer she turned fifteen I fretted I was losing Issie to her friends. Knowing I needed to let her go didn’t make it easier. I told myself I was grateful I’d held onto her for as long as I had. But, again, my worries didn’t come to fruition. We still hung out together, we still chatted and laughed and watched movies together.
People always told me how lucky I was that Issie and I were so close. ‘It must be lovely, just the two of you,’ someone once said. ‘My house is so full, I’ll never have that with my daughter.’
Lucky? Could anyone really think that? Did this woman standing in front of me in a queue at parents evening, who I barely knew, really believe I was fortunate my husband walked out on us to live another life in America? She had no clue that every decision I made had to be second-guessed because I had no one to run it by, or that feelings of inadequacy rippled through my everyday life.
The questions burned into me: why wasn’t I enough? Why wasn’t Issie enough? Scott’s betrayal sat in my core in ways I couldn’t comprehend for a long time.
I could replay the moment he told me he was leaving in slow motion, unwinding it in all its technicolour horror. It was a bleak, dark Monday evening in January when he walked in the door from work announcing he had something to tell me. I barely looked up from the steaks I was searing on the hob, his words had been so bland. When I eventually turned to him, I noticed there was a contorted expression on his face I couldn’t read. I switched the hob off and faced him, my mind running over what might be coming.
He hadn’t been happy at work lately. He was angry with colleagues, furious with a boss who had apparently thrown him under a bus. Scott had worked his way up to a high position. He complained he wasn’t going to get the next promotion anytime soon. He was back and forth to Boston a lot too, to where he grew up, and I knew it was taking a toll on him.
‘Sit down, Jess,’ he’d said, dropping his jacket over the back of a chair as he pulled out a seat for himself, though he didn’t sit on it.
I had thought it was going to be one of two things: he wanted to leave his job without having found another, and we would have to cut back for a while; or he wanted us to move to Boston. I hoped it would be the first option. That I could cope with. I was enjoying the nice holidays we’d been having but I didn’t need them. I could easily cut back on spending. It was only lately I’d started treating myself to designer bags and a camel coat that cost more than my first wage. But please not America. This was my home, here in England. I didn’t want to uproot our family.
‘There’s a job for me in Boston,’ he started, as a slow sinking feeling crept dread-like into my gut. ‘And I’m taking it,’ Scott was saying. ‘I’m moving back there—’ He had broken off and was staring at me with a look in his eyes that I couldn’t immediately place, but that felt like panic mixed with something else: determination.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, eventually. ‘How have you already made that decision? We haven’t even discussed it.’ But even then I knew there was more, something not right. Something he hadn’t yet told me, but was about to.
‘I’m sorry, Jess.’ Scott was shaking his head, and he did look very sorry in that moment. ‘I’m moving in with Rita.’
‘Rita?’ The name sucked the air from the room, like it always did whenever I heard it. Rita: my husband’s first wife, the woman who came before me. The woman I would still have been jealous of at that point if we didn’t live three thousand miles apart, because I always knew deep, deep in my heart that Scott had never stopped loving her.
Scott and Rita had split up six months before we met, when I was working as a marketing assistant at a large investment company, and he’d been flown in as a trouble-shooting operations director at a young age of thirty. He was only four years older than me, but a lifetime away on the career ladder.
I’d known that, despite his denial, he was still raw from the break-up and that possibly I shouldn’t be barrelling into a relationship with a man I was clearly falling for. But I couldn’t help myself, and time had proven Rita wasn’t a threat. She was moving on, meeting someone else. Soon they’d had a daughter together.
On the other side of the Atlantic Scott proposed to me after a year, we were making wedding plans and getting married and then having our own daughter. I left my job to become a full-time mum.
Of course Rita wasn’t a problem, we were happy. Scott and I still laughed every day, and planned trips together, and we had a child we both adored. Not for one moment did I think none of that was enough for him and that he would be able to give it all up so easily.
‘No.’ I shook my head, refusing to believe him. It was impossible. ‘How—’
You love me, I wanted to say. We’d been so happy over Christmas. We’d got drunk together, we’d had sex more than once over the holidays. This truly was not something I’d seen coming.
‘I still love you, Jess,’ he had told me.
I laughed at that. ‘You can’t still love me.’
‘I do. It’s just—’ He flapped an arm in the air. ‘It’s just that it’s Rita.’
And clearly I was never going to compare with her.
He was gone within the month. Everything already lined up: his job; Rita’s home that her ex had already left. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said a number of times over those four weeks. ‘Rita and I, we’re …’
‘Soul mates? Childhood sweethearts?’ I’d asked bitterly. ‘You should never have married me, Scott. I think you always knew one day you were going to hurt me.’
It tore my world apart. The kind of destruction that took me four years to slowly rebuild. Eight years on and I don’t love him any more. I don’t feel anything when I see him on Issie’s odd FaceTime call. But then there are times, when things aren’t so good, that his absence hits me most. Those are the times when I start questioning how his neglect might have affected us. Because it must have, surely? Issie can’t sail through life without feeling the impact of his abandonment. I am certain it is this that led her to choose a man like Dylan.
I flick my eyes over the swathes of fabric covering my desk. I need to arrange them onto a mood board for a new client, Polly, who I am seeing in two days’ time. I pick up some swatches of green velvet and attach them to the corner of the board.
Polly briefed me that she likes gold and greens. She showed me photos on Pinterest and then the antique chairs she wants upholstered for her boutique shop. She found me after reading my interview in a local home magazine, all about how I started my small business Coastal Design two years ago, and liked what she saw.
