Someone is Lying, page 24
‘It was Issie. Issie was driving.’
Kay feels everything inside of her shift, heavy weights sinking deeper into her gut, though she doesn’t know what this means when she should be pleased it wasn’t Dylan. Maybe it’s the simple fact that Issie has approached the police and pointed the finger at her son. Possibly it’s that Kay knows Jess Adams will stop at nothing to stick the blame on Dylan. ‘It was Issie who killed her?’ she says.
‘She’d been drinking,’ he goes on. ‘And she doesn’t even have a driving licence. She was so scared, I said we should just leave the woman there and go. It was my idea. I told Iz we could run, get away from there and hide out somewhere. I did it to protect her. She was never supposed to tell the police it was me.’
Kay buries her head in her hands as she absorbs the truth of what her son has told her, and of what she’s seen over the last year and yet never realised the extent of. She always knew Issie was different to the other girls. Her son fell hard for her from the start. She understood their differences could be a problem, and worried Dylan wouldn’t handle them. She certainly knew Dylan didn’t control Issie the way Jess had implied.
But what Kay didn’t see was that Dylan believed he loved this girl so much that he would give up everything for her. Her supposedly street-smart, stubborn nineteen-year-old who has always been slightly cocky and no doubt assured of his good looks. But who also has a heart of gold that he is happy to hand over to a girl he likes, and who would do anything for anyone.
Of course he is not his father’s son, Kay suddenly realises. He never has been. Dylan is her through and through. They are the ones who are used and manipulated and trodden on, and her heart cracks wide open at the thought that she didn’t do more to protect him.
‘Anyway, none of it matters,’ he is saying. ‘It’s not like I can do anything about it because it’s my word against hers – and you tell me who they’re going to believe.’
GONE: true crime podcast
Lucy Hawes
EPISODE 106: ISSIE ADAMS AND DYLAN WHITING: THE DEATH OF BEATRIZ MOTTO
PART TWO
The case would fast become a tale of two sides. Two teens who each insisted the other was to blame.
On her side, Issie Adams appointed Hugo Campbell to represent her. Campbell, a top criminal law solicitor from London, would defend Issie’s account of how she walked away from the scene of a crime and left a woman for dead. He is a man who has a reputation for fearless representation, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the law. If this were to come to trial, he would be the person you want standing in your corner.
Campbell’s name would begin to stretch the divide between the two families even further, a disparity that would play out more in the days to come. Because, if this was to go to court, as both families feared it would, then Kay and Dylan Whiting knew it wouldn’t be a fair fight.
But money wasn’t the only factor. So too was the past behaviour of the two mothers. Jess Adams had voiced her concern from the moment she lost contact with her daughter, always pointing the finger at Dylan. Her daughter had come forward of her own volition and made a statement in Portugal about the events of the night.
Kay Whiting, however, had lied to the police about speaking to Issie when Jess feared her daughter was in danger. Her reason for doing so was a deep-rooted belief that her son was telling her the truth, and fear of what would happen to him if she didn’t claim to know Issie was safe. A mistake on her part, and one that would be costly.
It certainly wasn’t going to help her son’s defence and neither would the fact Dylan had quickly returned to England and then disappeared again when Inspector Santos Melo tried to speak to him. The odds were most certainly against the Whitings.
Kay
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
15 July
The smell of bacon fills the house. Bacon isn’t something they usually have for breakfast. She doesn’t even know why she is cooking it this morning but she picked it up from the supermarket last night and thought they could all do with a bacon sandwich on a Saturday morning.
Dylan is sprawled over the sofa, his hoodie up and partially covering his face. Every so often he picks up his phone, scrolls through it then drops it down where it hits the carpet with a soft thud.
Issie isn’t answering his calls or replying to his texts. His mood has become even more subdued since the last response he had two days ago, a simple: I’m sorry. I panicked. A vague and meaningless apology that couldn’t even be used as evidence when it could easily refer to her going to the police in the first place.
Since then, there has been radio silence. No doubt she’s been told not to contact him.
This morning Kay is taking Dylan to the Citizens Advice, despite his reluctance. ‘What’s the point?’ he had said. ‘We all know no one’s going to believe me over her.’
‘That’s not true,’ Kay had responded, though she realises it likely is. When it is Issie’s word against Dylan’s, then isn’t it obvious? Kay doesn’t just mean the press either, or the public reading the news. She means the jury when it goes to court.
She can see how it will play out. Issie’s defence team will rip Dylan to shreds, but who will defend Dylan? They cannot afford a solicitor and so they would be supplied with someone straight out of law school with no experience, and it won’t turn out like it does in the movies when the underdog gets justice.
Meanwhile Jess Adams will have hired a hotshot solicitor who knows every angle to play, if they even have to bother. Because the sad truth is that the judge and jury would likely take one look at her son and his upbringing and then at Issie, the perfect girl next door. All of them would make a decision instantly. No one would fathom that, behind Issie’s shiny veneer, the girl is a liar who has fooled them all. She certainly fooled Kay.
Besides, Dylan was the one who hired the car, and Issie doesn’t even hold a driving licence. Dylan was seen driving out of the car rental earlier that evening. Jess was the one who flew out to Lisbon to look for her daughter, who spoke to the press, who has put the idea in everyone’s head that Kay’s son is evil.
Kay was the one who lied to the police.
No, Dylan is right. Not one person will believe him over Issie because everything has been stacked against them from the start. But she has to talk to someone. She needs to know what options they have if she can ever get her son to consider telling the police what actually happened, and the Citizens Advice is their only choice.
Dylan gets up from the sofa and comes into the kitchen and Kay holds out a hand towards him, which he takes. She squeezes her fingers round his and closes her eyes as tears well in them.
She can’t believe that she could have considered him to be anything like Neil. She was the one who held him when he was a baby, who rocked him at night when he wouldn’t sleep and whispered stories into his ears of boys who went on adventures and had big dreams. She was the one who helped him press stickers into his collection books, and who watched him clutching the bars at the zoo as he rocked with laughter at the chimpanzees.
She is the one who has built up a memory book of Dylan over nineteen years. No one else will ever come close to knowing her son or loving him like she does. And yet for a moment she had doubts too. If Kay didn’t believe in her son, how can she expect anyone else to?
‘We will get through this,’ she tells him, with a certainty she does not have.
By lunchtime Kay, Dylan and Billy are making the short bus journey to Lymington where the Citizens Advice is in the town hall. Here they ask about legal aid, free legal advice, solicitors who might take them on a no-win-no-fee basis. Kay frowns at Dylan’s joke that at least this way they won’t have to pay a penny.
‘Don’t say that,’ she mutters as they leave. She would give everything to make sure her son gets the justice he deserves.
What they do have is the name of a criminal defence solicitor in Southampton who accepts legal aid and gives them an appointment for later that afternoon. Getting to Southampton means two train journeys and a walk but, within the hour, they are sitting in the reception of Eric Locke solicitors.
Kay has bought Billy a Lego Ninjago magazine and a tube of Smarties as a treat and both are keeping him entertained. Beside her, Dylan fidgets. His leg is restless, his heel tapping rhythmically on the cold tiled floor. Kay rests a hand on his thigh and he smiles and stops his frantic movements, but only for a moment before they start up again.
He used to do that when he was younger. There was a time when he could never sit still. She glances at her eldest son as he scrolls through his phone, watching silent videos that flash and roll too quickly for her to see what they are.
The last few years have passed in a blur. She doesn’t know how they got here. Dylan is a man now and yet he needs her more than ever. It’s a thought that makes her heart stretch until she fears it will snap. They tell you they never stop needing you and yet she hasn’t recognised it since he left school and got a job. Did it really have to take something like this for her to see it, she thinks as Eric Locke appears behind the reception desk and calls Dylan’s name.
Eric is in his mid-sixties and Kay isn’t certain if she’s pleased he isn’t some young kid straight out of law school, because she can’t imagine Eric standing in court defending Dylan with his grey hair and friendly face.
Regardless, she and Dylan follow him into his small office with worn leather chairs and a mahogany desk with a leather writing pad on top of it. Next to his notebook are photo frames that portray him as a family man with children and young grandchildren and a pot stuffed with fountain pens.
‘We can’t afford to pay for this ourselves,’ Kay tells him before they have begun. She has mentioned this over the phone, but the fear of spending an hour in his company and leaving with minimal advice and a hefty bill fills her with dread and she would rather walk out now than have a debt hanging over them.
‘We can apply for legal aid,’ he tells her. ‘It’s means tested so if you believe you’ll qualify—’
‘We will,’ she says firmly.
Eric nods. ‘Let’s start at the beginning then, shall we? Dylan, do you want to tell me why you’re here.’
Kay sits stiffly in her seat as Dylan begins telling him what happened in Lisbon. He relays the story from the point he hired a car and how he’d planned a surprise lunch in a castle for the following day – Issie’s eighteenth – but that they never made it.
Instead Issie was already drunk by the time they got in the car and had met Beatriz Motto, a young girl who pointed them towards Graça, where they could see the lights of the city, and had asked for a lift there.
Dylan laughs now and makes a joke about how he thought he might have even proposed to Issie that night. He waves a hand when Kay snaps her head to look at him. ‘I wouldn’t have done it,’ he says, but she isn’t so sure.
He goes on, telling Eric how Issie told him she wanted to leave, but that he’d said he wasn’t taking her anywhere. He looks ashamed as he admits this, but this is Dylan, as Kay knows. Her son can be obstinate when he wants to be.
‘The angrier she got with me, the more adamant I was we weren’t going anywhere,’ Dylan tells Eric. ‘I had this feeling she was going to finish with me and I – I just didn’t want her to,’ he says honestly. ‘I thought if I took her back to the hostel she was going to pack her bags and go home.’
Next, he relays how she had taken the keys out of the back pocket of his jeans, and opened the driver’s door. ‘I didn’t do anything to stop her because I didn’t think for one minute she’d drive off. I wish I had,’ he goes on. ‘Of course I wish I’d taken them off her, but she was goading me, waving them around, and I thought, Sure. Go on then.’ He pauses, looks up expectantly. ‘But then she did.’
Eric’s expression doesn’t change as he listens to Dylan’s story of how Issie climbed into the car and turned on the engine, jolting forward before speeding off round the sharp bend. Only seconds later Dylan had heard a screech of brakes.
‘I didn’t even run round there at first,’ he says. ‘I thought she’d come to her senses and had stopped suddenly and would be waiting for me. I took my time walking round the corner. I was pissed off with her,’ he goes on. ‘I was so angry. But as soon as I got there I saw something in the beam of the headlights. I thought it was a deer. Only for a split second, though. After that I could see it was a person, lying on the ground in front of the car. Her leg was bent at the knee,’ he says.
Dylan hangs his head. ‘It was awful. Issie was sitting there, staring out the windscreen. I knew she must have hit them. She was in shock and I started yelling at her to get out of the car, but she didn’t move and I was screaming at her, saying, “What the hell’s happened?” but she just looked blankly at me.
‘I opened her door in the end, and hauled her out. She asked me if the woman was still alive. I checked, but I knew she wasn’t. That’s when …’ Dylan falters. ‘That’s when we made a decision. Issie started panicking. She was crying. She kept saying she couldn’t go to prison and so I said she wouldn’t have to. I told her no one needed to know we were ever there.’
Dylan lets out a breath and turns to Kay. ‘I know it was wrong, but I did it for her.’ Kay sees his eyes darken now. Something in him has hardened. Something that makes him realise he was stupid to protect Issie after all. ‘I did it because I loved her and, in that moment, I thought that was the right thing.’
He thought she would stay with him if he did that for her, Kay realises.
‘I guess I hoped we could get away with it,’ he says quietly. ‘But Issie must have had a back-up plan all along. The moment she found out I’d spoken to you on the phone, she didn’t believe I hadn’t told you,’ he says to Kay. ‘She thought she couldn’t trust me.’ He turns back to Eric and adds, ‘She thought I’d told Mum the truth. That’s when Issie told me we needed to go back to Lisbon, and so we got a bus back. She must have decided then to make sure it was always going to be her word against mine.’
Eric finishes making notes and looks up at Dylan. ‘Anything else you want to add at this point?’
Dylan shakes his head.
‘What happens next?’ Kay asks.
‘Okay, well, the British police won’t have any jurisdiction to bring charges. It’s the Portuguese police who will need to gather enough evidence to arrest Dylan, if that’s the way they decide to go. To do that, they need an extradition order. This will enable them to bring their person of interest back to Portugal and charge them. They’ll need to send evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service. Evidence they may or may not have. With regards to you, Dylan, I don’t know how they’ll be able to prove you were driving the car that killed Beatriz Motto when, by the sound of it, all they have is your girlfriend’s statement.’
‘Which isn’t even true,’ Dylan pipes up.
Eric splays his hands palms upwards and nods slowly. ‘And whatever evidence they produce we can dispute.’
‘So what are you suggesting?’ Kay asks. ‘We wait for them to charge him?’
‘You could wait for them to attempt to charge him,’ Eric concurs. ‘And if this is the route they try to go down, it’ll take at least a few weeks.’
‘Or he speaks up,’ she says, ‘and tells them the truth.’
‘And then it’s my word against Issie’s,’ Dylan says, through gritted teeth. He slams a hand down on the desk. ‘No. I can’t hand myself over to them. If I do that, I go up against her and we both know there’s no point in that. I’m better off keeping quiet and hoping they can’t prove anything.’
Kay stares sadly at her son with a realisation that maybe he’s right. There’s little point going up against a family with their means. Yet if he does nothing but hope for the best, Issie will get away with what she’s done.
Somehow, either way, Dylan’s life will be the one that is destroyed.
Jess
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
15 July
In Hugo’s absence, Scott swoops around the kitchen as though he’s in court defending Issie himself. ‘The thing we have to make sure is that everyone understands why you didn’t speak sooner,’ he is saying. ‘Because at any time you could have done.’ He pauses, spreading his hands on the kitchen table where she remains seated. ‘But they need to know Dylan made you feel like you couldn’t.’
Issie hangs off his every word and, in return, I look on in horror. Only two days ago I believed that this was the reality but now I know it isn’t true. And yet, Scott talks as if it is, like he has convinced himself Issie isn’t lying. That none of us are lying. And he does it so well.
And what about her, I think, as I watch them conspiring with each other. Her deception ran deep from the point she came back to Lisbon and drip-fed me snippets that reeled me in and had me believe the worst of what Dylan could be capable of.
Right now I don’t trust myself to speak for fear that if I do I will tell them both we cannot go through with this. But once Issie slips out of the room I mutter to Scott, ‘He doesn’t deserve this.’
‘You can’t think like that,’ he shoots back. ‘And besides, all the things you’ve said about him.’
‘That isn’t the point.’
‘Isn’t it? You told me yourself he controlled Issie. That theirs wasn’t a good relationship. You said he manipulated her from the start.’
‘The way you manipulate everyone around you?’ I hiss back without thinking.
‘What?’ Scott laughs and glances over my shoulder as Issie walks back in.
‘What are you saying?’ she asks.
‘Nothing,’ I tell her. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’
‘Dad’s right. You always hated Dylan,’ she says eventually.
‘Yes, but do you?’ I ask her, meaningfully.
By the look on her face, I can see I have shocked her. ‘If it wasn’t for him it wouldn’t have happened,’ Issie argues. ‘If he’d taken me back when I asked him to, I would never have got in the car.’
