Someone is Lying, page 18
It is 11 a.m. when we get back to the hotel. I ask if we can have our room back, though I don’t know how long we will need it for. It hasn’t been cleaned yet and so the key is handed over to me.
‘I need to call your dad,’ I tell Issie, dialling his number. ‘He needs to know what’s going on.’
Scott answers immediately and I fill him in on what she told the inspector.
‘Shit,’ he says with a whistle through his teeth. I give him a moment to take it in but am not prepared for him then demanding, ‘Why the hell did she say all that? Didn’t I say for her to make no comment?’
‘Scott! As if that’s the important thing here,’ I cry, turning away from her and hissing into the phone, ‘A woman is dead.’
‘I know. And our daughter has implicated herself in covering it up.’
I’m too taken aback to respond.
‘Are you able to leave the country?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘Then get on a plane. Get on the earliest flight you can and get back to England.’
‘Why are you making it sound so urgent?’ I say through gritted teeth, aware Issie is hovering behind me, listening to every word, and that Scott appears more angry that I allowed her to talk than about what she did.
‘Because she’s covered up a crime, Jess. But right now their focus will be on Dylan. I assume you don’t know what his story is?’
‘No, because they don’t know where he’s gone,’ I mutter. ‘What could happen to her?’ I don’t even attempt to shelter Issie from my question. She is now staring at me from where she is standing in the corner of the room.
‘I don’t know.’ He sighs. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Okay. I think there’s a flight we can get tonight.’
‘Good. Book it. And, Jess, I’m getting the red-eye tonight to Heathrow. I’ll be there in the morning.’
‘No, Scott, you don’t need to—’
‘I am coming,’ he says sharply, and then adds, a little softer, ‘You don’t get to stop me this time.’
He hangs up the call before I get the chance to argue, though right now my fears about Issie’s future override any resistance to seeing Scott. I tell her her dad’s coming over. ‘It must be serious,’ she jokes, but her tone changes when she sees the look I am giving her. ‘I didn’t mean that. I know it’s serious.’ She looks abashed.
I don’t reply as I pull up the Air Portugal website on my phone and manage to book two tickets for later this evening.
‘What I said, it was a stupid joke,’ she says again when I’m done. ‘I didn’t mean to make light of it. I’m scared,’ she adds, and I notice the way her hands fidget at her sides as her fingers fumble with the fabric of her shorts. ‘I’m really scared.’
I am scared too, but all I say is, ‘I just wish things hadn’t got this far.’
‘You wish I’d called the police when it happened?’
‘Of course I do!’
‘I know. I do get that.’
‘Did you really believe it could ever have been your fault?’
Her eyes widen at my question and I look away. I recall the number of times Scott has made me feel like a failure over the years. He’s done it more than once in the last week, dropping in an accusation that I shouldn’t have let Issie go travelling with Dylan when I didn’t trust him, and that I allowed her to admit her compliance in the young woman’s death. Of course Dylan made her believe it was her fault.
‘But I know things would have been different,’ she is saying. ‘He wouldn’t have been so angry if I hadn’t—’
‘Stop right there, Iz,’ I tell her. ‘This was not you. You made some wrong choices but you’re putting it right now. I do know,’ I say more softly after a beat. ‘I do know how men like him operate.’
She scrunches up her eyes at me and I realise this isn’t the right time to get into this particular conversation. So instead I focus on doing what Scott tells me to: getting my daughter out of the country.
Issie’s relief as the plane taxis down the runway at Lisbon’s airport is palpable. I watch as she contorts forward in her seat, looking at the ground below as we leave it behind. I wonder if she believes that, in leaving Portugal, she can simply leave everything that has happened behind her. Whether she has any idea how much all of this will follow her.
I relax only slightly now we are on the plane, safe in the knowledge Dylan isn’t on it because I have scoured the faces of the passengers for any sight of him. Still, I don’t like the thought of him being out there, in some place unknown. Does he know what flight she is on? And what time she will land in London?
‘Do you have any idea where he is?’ I ask her.
‘No. I promise you I don’t.’ She has a searching look in her eyes. Maybe it’s that she is begging me to believe her now she is finally telling the truth. Or perhaps she is trying to figure out what Dylan vanishing again means for her.
‘What was your argument about, Iz?’ I say. ‘You said something about the way he made you feel.’
Issie shrugs. ‘Sometimes he got a kick out of making me jealous.’
I frown, and am about to reply when she says, ‘He knows what I’ve done. He’ll know I’ve spoken to the police.’
‘Yes,’ I reply, because we both understand that her telling the truth is the one thing he has been stopping her from doing. Neither of us know how he will react, but at least we are creating some distance between us and him. Melo’s attention is on finding Dylan and, with any luck, they’ll be able to detain him. I hold on to a hope that he may not be coming back to England any time soon.
Now Issie leans back in her seat, resting her head, and turns to look at me. ‘What’s going to happen when we get home?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admit. ‘Dad’s talking to a solicitor he knows. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you’re okay.’
She nods and looks away again, back out of the window as we bump through the clouds. ‘I don’t want to go to prison, Mum.’ The words are so quiet, I can barely hear them.
‘That’s not going to happen, I promise,’ I tell her, wondering if it is a promise I can keep. All I know is that she is my daughter, and that it is my job to look after her. Yes, she made a wrong choice, but what choice did she have if Dylan didn’t allow her one?
I cannot get my head round what he did to her. How he took her away, made her lose contact with me, and on her birthday too. And all because he didn’t want her talking. It frightens me how easily she’s allowed it to happen. It feels like history repeating itself – no matter what I’ve tried to do she’s as gullible and naive as I always was with her father.
Issie presses her finger against the window and glances back at me until I look away. Though as soon as she is facing away from me, I turn back to her.
I can’t help but watch closely as she starts making shapes on the glass that I don’t recognise at first. The closer I look I can see she is making letters and so I concentrate as she draws them intently onto the window pane, spelling out D Y L A N in what is invisible to the eye.
I sit back uneasily before she turns around again, my heart beating more rapidly than before. I want to open her up and look inside her. I want her to tell me everything she is thinking. I might have lost that privilege years ago but it has never felt so urgent as it does right now. What is it about Dylan that means she will not let go? How deeply has he got under her skin?
Two and a half hours later we land in Heathrow and I turn my phone back on to a message from Inspector Melo. Dylan, it appears, is in England. He had flown back almost twenty-fours ago, before Melo and his team had found Beatriz’s body. We have not escaped him, I realise. Because he is already here waiting for us.
Kay
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
12 July
Kay watches her son as he pores over his phone. He has been back home for over twenty-four hours now, turning up in the early hours of yesterday morning after catching a late-night flight the day after he returned to Lisbon.
It is 11 a.m. and he is standing at the back door, smoking a cigarette and flicking ash into one of her empty tubs, cradling a mug of coffee with his free hand.
‘I thought you’d given up,’ she says.
‘Coffee?’ he replies wryly. ‘No chance.’
‘Smoking, Dylan.’
Her son throws the cigarette to the ground, rolling his shoe over it to put it out. ‘I had.’
‘It’s expensive,’ she points out.
‘I know. I don’t even particularly want it.’ He comes inside and kisses her on the head. ‘My last one,’ he tells her.
Kay frowns. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘But, on the off-chance it isn’t, can you make sure Billy doesn’t see you.’
Dylan nods as he goes back to his phone. She had asked Mike for the day off today so she could spend it with Dylan, and Mike was clearly fine with it. Since the conversation they’d had before the weekend, they haven’t yet brought up his inference he couldn’t keep her on, but she knows they’ll have to sooner or later.
She’d wanted her and Dylan to spend some time together, but the day isn’t panning out as she’d hoped. Issie did not get on a flight this morning as Dylan believed she was doing. She has not touched down in Heathrow as she’d told him she would be. Her son has no idea why, and there is nothing Kay can say to put his mind at rest when he cannot get hold of his girlfriend whose phone is now switched off and who is not back in the country.
He paces the kitchen and then heads into the front room, where he goes to stand by the window, running a hand across his chin. His hair is sticking up, she notices. It needs a good cut.
Kay doesn’t like to see him so worried about Issie, but there’s been something edgy about him since he got home yesterday. He hasn’t been his usual happy self and neither has he wanted to speak much about the fact he and Issie returned to Lisbon two days ago amid headlines that screamed suggestions he had murdered her.
Luckily they hadn’t reached the papers, she thinks now. Features on websites had quickly been covered up as a non-story when the two of them were discovered to be perfectly fine only hours later.
‘You didn’t believe I could do that did you, Mum?’ he had asked her when he called her the afternoon they had got back to Lisbon.
‘Of course I didn’t believe them,’ she’d said with conviction. As soon as the relief had set in she could start to believe it too. She would convince herself there was not even one moment it had crossed her mind her son could be capable of doing anything to hurt Issie.
They’d had an argument, like he said. The pair of them needed the space to sort it out. Now Kay could comfort herself that she wasn’t naive as she’d accused herself of being, and that Dylan was nothing like his father as she’d briefly feared.
But surely the headlines on news sites must have affected Dylan more than he implied? Insinuations he was capable of killing the girl he loves.
Dylan’s hand clenches into a fist and he punches it against her front room wall. ‘Dylan?’ she calls through, questioningly. He doesn’t acknowledge her. She narrows her eyes as she regards him, unsure what mixture of headlines and Issie’s refusal to pick up her phone are bothering him the most. It unnerves her to see him this way, and she isn’t sure how best to approach it.
‘I’m sure she’s okay,’ Kay says to him now, a platitude that won’t work, because neither of them knows this is the case.
‘So why isn’t she taking my calls?’ He can still see Issie’s location, somehow, on his phone. Before she turned her phone off, he could see her image and so knew she was still in Portugal and not coming home like she’d told him.
‘Maybe she’s on the plane now,’ Kay suggests. ‘Their flight could have been delayed.’
‘So why didn’t she tell me?’ he mutters. ‘Why not text to say that, or that she was getting a later one?’ He bangs his phone against his thigh.
Kay doesn’t have an answer for him. But, as the hours tick by, Dylan is getting more rattled as he tries numerous times to get hold of Issie, making no effort to hide the fact he is smoking another cigarette at the end of the garden.
When he had arrived home early yesterday morning, Kay had lunged towards him and enveloped him in a hug, dropping Billy’s school shoes that she had been cleaning. She hugged him so tightly and began to cry. All of her emotions from the last week had been building up and, right in that moment, she couldn’t stop them from coming out at the same time.
Eventually she pulled back and banged a hand lightly on his chest. ‘I missed you,’ she told him, studying his face in earnest. She had to look up to him now he was five foot eleven. One day he was her little boy and the next he was this grown man. She couldn’t remember when it had happened. Often she wondered if she had missed many things about Dylan growing up. Since he was twelve, her focus had been on Billy and his needs. Had she been paying enough attention to her eldest boy? Did she know as much as she should about the man he had become?
She led him through to the tiny galley kitchen at the back of the house where she filled the kettle and flicked it on without asking if he wanted a cup of tea. She would make them both one anyway. She pointed out the Victoria sponge she’d made the night before for his return.
‘Why haven’t you and Issie come home together?’ she’d asked him. ‘You were supposed to be travelling – couldn’t you have carried on? Didn’t you want to?’ she said, despite how pleased she was to have him home.
‘It was time,’ he told her, but his attention was on helping her, picking mugs off the draining board, plucking tea bags out of the jar. While she couldn’t read his expression, she thought it didn’t seem like his heart was in his statement.
‘I take it this was Jess’s decision,’ she’d muttered. Jess, who had no doubt been sleeping in her plush hotel bed with high thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, her daughter in bed beside her, right where she wanted her. Could the woman see there was something a little ridiculous in the notion of her bringing her eighteen-year-old home when her worries about Dylan hadn’t come to fruition?
Kay had run a hand over her son’s hair and smiled at him. None of that mattered now she had her family back in one piece again. If it was possible to feel the cracks in your heart heal over, then in that moment, that was exactly what Kay felt.
But in the last twenty-four hours, anxiety has crept in again. Now, the hours continue to tick by, and Dylan still has no news of Issie. He can’t get hold of her and Kay doesn’t feel comfortable with the way he’s getting more irritated, more angry.
At 2.30 p.m. she is hanging her washing out to dry on the line when she hears Dylan’s phone ringing from inside the house. She glances at the kitchen window where she can see him standing with his back to the sink and stops pegging Billy’s school shirts so she can listen out for whether it is Issie.
Whoever it is, and whatever they are saying, causes Dylan’s body language to strain. She can sense his stress as he runs a hand through his hair, which then stops short and remains solid against his scalp. She can see how tense he is as he stands bolt upright.
Kay takes the washing basket back into the kitchen. She knows immediately something is wrong. His face says it all when he turns to stare at her. He doesn’t say a word but she can make out the sound of a man’s voice on the other end of the line.
Dylan listens to whatever it is that is said and then puts the phone down before responding.
‘Who was that?’ Kay asks.
‘It was no one.’
‘Dylan?’ She can almost see the way his brain is ticking over behind his eyes. Does he not realise there are certain things about him she knows so well?
His breaths are erratic and he appears not to know what to say. ‘This …’ He wavers. ‘I have to sort something out.’ He looks at her with concern, puts a hand on her arm as if to tell her there is nothing to worry about, then starts searching for something on his phone.
She looks over his shoulder as he enlarges a map. ‘Is that Issie?’ She points at the animated figure, which suggests she has her phone back on again.
‘She’s at Lisbon airport,’ he murmurs, more to himself than to her, which they both know means she wasn’t on a flight earlier after all.
She can see his brain continue to tick and Kay wants to know what is going on, but she glances at the clock and suddenly realises with a lurch that she’s going to be late to pick Billy up if she doesn’t leave now.
‘We’ll talk when I get back,’ she tells him and Dylan nods. She doubts he has listened to what she has said, his mind is somewhere else entirely.
At the school gate, the same huddle of mothers stare in her direction. She avoids their glare and thinks them cowards for not speaking to her face if they have something to say, though she dreads the idea of it all the same.
Kay left the house with a sense of unease and so she supposes she shouldn’t be surprised when, forty minutes later, she walks back in with Billy and there is no sign of Dylan. She sticks the television on for her youngest and goes upstairs to Dylan’s bedroom. There is a pile of clothes upturned on his floor but she notices straight away that his rucksack, which had been lodged against the wardrobe, is no longer there.
She tries calling him but he doesn’t answer so she leaves him a message. She does this a number of times over the next two hours but each time she is met with radio silence.
Finally Kay can’t bear it any longer. She needs to know what’s going on. Something has spooked her son. Something that she is certain has to do with Issie and the phone call he had earlier.
There was a familiar lilt to the odd word she’d heard on the other end of the line, and the more she thinks about it the more she believes the person who called Dylan was the inspector from Lisbon.
Kay pulls up the number from her call log and stares at it. If she calls him she may get an answer. But what if he tells her something she doesn’t want to hear? She laughs at the idea, because what more could there be? And so she presses dial.
‘Melo,’ he answers, swiftly.
