Peter James: Need You Dead

At the first salon she worked in after qualifying as a hairdresser, Lorna had a client who was an anthropologist at Sussex University. He’d told her his theory, and it intrigued her. That early human beings communicated entirely by telepathy, and we only learned to speak so that we could lie.

Over the subsequent fifteen years she’d come to realize there really might be some truth in this. There’s the side of us we show and the side we keep private, hidden. The truth. And the lies. That’s how the world rolls.

She got that.

Boy, did she.

And right now she was hurting badly from a lie.

As she brushed the colour into Alison Kennedy’s roots, she was thinking. Distracted. Not her usually chatty self. Thinking about Greg. Devastated by what she had discovered about her lover. She was desperate to finish Alison and get back to her laptop before her husband, Corin, came home in an hour’s time.

Her six Labradoodle puppies that she had bred from their mother, Milly, yapped away in the conservatory adjoining the kitchen that doubled, these days, as her salon. She’d started working from home, much to Corin’s annoyance, so that she could indulge in her passion of breeding these lovely creatures, and it brought in a decent extra bit of income — although Corin sneered at it. He sneered at pretty much everything she did these days, from the food she put in front of him to the clothes she wore. At least her dogs loved her. And, she had thought, so did Greg.

Client after client opened up to her, treating their time with her, whilst she did their hair, as being in a kind of psychiatrist’s chair. They would tell her their most intimate relationship problems, and reveal even the secrets they kept from their partners. Alison was babbling away excitedly, telling her about her latest affair, this time with her personal trainer.

Was there anyone who didn’t have a secret? Lorna sometimes wondered.

She had also just discovered, by chance from a client earlier today, sometime before Alison, something intensely painful. Finding out the truth about someone — in particular someone you love — can hurt like hell. A truth that a part of you really wishes you hadn’t learned. A truth that can turn your entire world upside down. Because you can’t unlearn something, can’t wipe that discovery from your brain the way you can delete a file from your computer, however much you might want to.

After Alison Kennedy left, at a few minutes before 6 p.m., Lorna hurriedly opened her laptop on the kitchen table and stared once more at the loved-up couple in the photograph in front of her. Stared in numb disbelief, her eyes misted with tears of hurt and anger. Anger that was turning to fury.

You bastard. You lying bloody rat.

Lorna balled her fists, lunging at the air, imagining she was punching his smug face, his smug smile, his phony sincerity. Punching his bloody lights out.

Eighteen months into their affair, Lorna had suddenly, unhappily, found out the truth about him. Discovered that the man she was besotted with, and with whom she had been planning to spend the rest of her life, had been lying to her. Not just lying. Living a total second life with her. Everything he had told her about himself was a lie.

She was gutted. And angry at herself. What a bloody fool she had been, again.

She had trusted him totally. Believed his endless promises that he was just waiting for the right moment to tell his wife. He’d given Lorna one excuse after another for delaying: Belinda was ill; Belinda was close to a breakdown; Belinda’s father was terminally ill and he had to support her through it until he died; Belinda’s brother was in a coma following a motorcycle accident.

Poor sodding Belinda. And now Lorna had found out she wasn’t even called Belinda.

‘Greg’ had recently come back from a holiday with ‘Belinda’ in the Maldives. The doctors had told him his wife needed a break to recover her mental health. Before he went, he’d promised Lorna that he was going to leave Belinda just as soon as he could after their return. They’d even been planning a date. His escape from ‘Belinda’. Her escape from her bastard of a husband, Corin.

Yeah?

How stupid did ‘Greg’ think she was?

Until just a few days ago, Lorna had been feeling really happy and secure. Believing that the soulmate she thought she had finally found in life, who had for the past year and a half made the nightmare of her abusive marriage just about tolerable, would rescue her from her living hell.

Then her first client today, Kerrie Taberner, who she had squeezed in at the last minute, had come in looking more beautiful than ever, with a glorious tan from a holiday in the Maldives. She’d shown Lorna some of her pictures of the island of Kuramathi on her phone and there, totally by chance, was one of a couple she and her husband had met in a bar one night. A totally loved-up couple, Kerrie had said. She had wittered on about how nice it was to meet a couple who clearly really loved each other, when so many couples who’d been married a long time just seemed to end up bickering constantly.

The man in the photograph was, unmistakably, ‘Greg’.

‘Greg’ and ‘Belinda’. Arms round each other, laughing, looking into each other’s eyes.

Except those weren’t the names that they’d given to Kerrie. They’d given quite different names. Their real names.

What a bastard. What a stupid bastard. Didn’t it occur to him that it might show up on Facebook or somewhere like that?

‘Belinda’!

Belinda and Greg.

And what hurt most of all was that she had believed him. Trusted him.

Trusted ‘Greg’.

He’d lied about his name. He wasn’t bloody ‘Greg’ at all. And she wasn’t ‘Belinda’.

Once she had his real name it had only taken her moments on Google to find out who he really was.

But now she knew, in her confused, angry state, she wasn’t sure whether she was glad to know the truth or not. Her dream was shattered. Her dream of a life with this man — this two-timing love-rat bastard. Everything he had told her was a lie. Everything they had done together was just a bloody lie.

She sat at the kitchen table of the house — the home — she had shared with Corin for the past seven years, and stared bleakly at the huge glass fish tank that took up almost an entire wall. Brightly coloured tropical fish swam or drifted through the water, some gulping bits of food from the surface. Corin was obsessed with them, knew all the breeds. Gobies, Darters, Guppies, Rainbow fish, Gars, and all the rest.

He doted on them. Several of them had mournful expressions, reminding her of her own life. Just as they were imprisoned in this tank, which was all of the world they would ever know, she was imprisoned here in this house in Hollingbury, on the outskirts of Brighton, with a man she despised, scared this might be all the world she would ever know. And now that seemed even more likely.

God, it had all been so different when she had met Corin. The handsome, dashing, charming computer sales manager, who’d swept her off her feet and taken her to St Lucia, where they’d spent wonderful, happy days, snorkelling, sunbathing, making love and eating. They’d married a few months later, and it was soon after then that it had all started to go south. Maybe she should have recognized the signs of a control freak when they’d been on that idyllic holiday; by the obsessive way he had laid out his clothing, applied his suntan lotion through measuring applicators and chided her for squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle, instead of rolling it from the end. From the way he planned out every hour of every day, and had been unhappy when they’d gone off schedule, even by a few minutes. But she hadn’t, because she’d been crazy for him. She had paid for that, increasingly, day by day, ever since.