Camilla Way - The Lies We Told - The exciting new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of Watching Edie

‘Callum was being annoying,’ Hannah shrugged, when I asked her why she’d done it. By this time she was seven years old.

It was a small village. She had already bullied half the school by then and Kathy wasn’t the type to keep anything to herself. Soon everyone would know. Long ago, in my naïve, pre-children days when I used to dream about my future family, I believed I would make friends with all the other local mothers. Our kids would play happily together in each other’s gardens; lasting friendships would be formed. Of course back then I believed we’d still be living in our old village, the one I myself had grown up in. But it wasn’t to be. Still, I’d hoped very much to be a part of this new community. It was to be a fresh start for us all. Yet here we were: my child was a pariah. She had no friends, was never invited anywhere to play. The other school mums would meet up regularly but never include me. And now this. I didn’t know how I’d be able to face going out in public again.

The next day, after dropping Hannah off at school, I drove to Peterborough library. I headed to the Psychology section and began to search. I scarcely knew what I was looking for until I found it, and when I did, I barely noticed my tears as they fell.

When Doug got home from work that night I was sitting on the sofa waiting for him. He’d got back late the night before so we hadn’t had a chance to talk properly about what Hannah had done and he looked at me warily as he came in.

‘I just want you to listen to me, OK?’ I said.

When he nodded and sat down next to me I handed him the wedge of photocopies I’d made that afternoon. He glanced at me, brow furrowed, before flicking through them. I held my breath.

Finally he looked up, his eyes wide. ‘Personality Disorders in Childhood?’ he said. ‘Early Warning Signs of Sociopathy? Are you serious?’

I leant towards him. ‘Doug, it’s time we faced facts. We can’t continue like this, Hannah set fire to Callum’s room, she hurt my eye so badly I had to go to A&E. She killed Lucy … then there’s the lying, the stealing, the bullying …’ I could hear my voice rising and I made myself stop and take a breath. ‘There’s something called Antisocial Personality Disorder and the books say there are certain red flags to look out for.’ Eagerly I took the printouts from him and flicked through until I found the one I wanted, reading aloud, ‘“Antisocial Personality Disorder and sociopathy can be traced back to childhood: desire to torture or kill animals; predilection for arson, manipulation of others. Lack of remorse, apparent absence of emotion …”’ I looked up at him. ‘Doug, there might as well be a picture of Hannah right next to this!’

‘Beth,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘Come on now …’

‘Why are you denying it?’ I asked. ‘We could get her help. We could get us help.’

‘So, what – you want her committed?’ he replied, his distress adding a harsh angry edge to his voice. ‘Locked up? Are you saying she’s – what? – some sort of future serial killer? Is that it?’

‘No! No of course I’m not saying that. I’m as scared as you are. I love Hannah! But I know there’s something badly wrong with our little girl, and we need to get her help as soon as possible. I know you’re frightened, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t love her. And what – what if she hurts Toby?’

He looked away. ‘That shrink we took her to before, he said there was nothing wrong with her.’

‘He said she was too young to make a diagnosis.’

‘ Christ .’ He got up and paced around the room, coming to a stop by the window, where he stood looking out in silence. When he finally spoke his voice was tight and strange. ‘If this is true, if you’re right … what if they take her away from us, Beth? What if they say we can’t look after her properly, that it’s our fault she’s the way she is?’

‘She’s getting worse, Doug,’ I said gently. ‘She needs help. We all do.’

He nodded, and I held my breath while he continued to stare out of the window. ‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘OK. Let’s try to get her another referral.’ He glanced at me. ‘As long as it’s not with that berk in Peterborough.’

He smiled sadly at me then, something he hadn’t done, it seemed to me, for a long time, and I could have cried with relief. And I think it was that rare moment of closeness that moved me to say what I said next, to bring up something from years before, that we’d both promised never to mention again. ‘I want to talk about what happened, Doug,’ I blurted. ‘About what we did.’

He knew instantly what I meant, and he became very still. My words hung in the air between us. ‘Look, Beth,’ he said at last, ‘I can’t deal with this now …’

‘Please, Doug,’ I begged. ‘Just let me talk about it. I need to. I think about it all the time, don’t you? I wake up with it on my mind, the lies we told, that girl’s poor family …’

His voice was sharp. ‘Beth, that’s all in the past. We agreed—’

‘But, what we did was wrong. It was so wrong, we should never have—’

He glanced at me and the sudden coldness in his eyes stopped me in my tracks. ‘You wanted to do it. And we have to live with that now.’

I gaped at him. ‘Me? I wanted? Doug, we both did.’ He shook his head and got to his feet. ‘Please, Doug, please don’t go.’ I started to cry.

He stopped, his back to me, he was very still and quiet, and then with a sudden movement, he went quickly from the room. I heard the front door slam shut. He didn’t come back until many hours later, drunk and silent and still too furious even to look at me.

We barely spoke in the following days. I made the appointment with the GP, who referred me to a child psychologist in Cambridge who had a waiting list of several weeks. The loneliness in the days after my talk with Doug was unbearable. I sank deeper and deeper inside myself, brooding over things that should have been left firmly in the past. I knew there was only one person who could help me – the same person who’d provided all the answers once before; who knew our secret, as we knew theirs. It would be such a relief to talk about it, like lancing a wound that had been allowed to fester too long. Of course, I knew Doug would never agree, would be horrified at the very idea of us being in contact again – yet the more I fantasized about making the phone call, the more desperate I became to do it.

London, 2017

After Mac had left, his revelation ringing in her ears, Clara sat motionless on the sofa, her shock so absolute that, for now at least, she felt nothing, the world stripped of sound and sensation, like the aftermath of an explosion. But she knew the pain was coming; could sense the tsunami swelling on the horizon, gathering strength, waiting to break.

Her gaze fell to the photograph of her and Luke on Hampstead Heath, her face turned so lovingly towards his, her eyes shining with happiness. Idiot . She thought now of all the hundreds of times when he’d appeared to love her. Which of those had been a lie? When had he started to be dissatisfied with her, to begin to draw away, look elsewhere?

She remembered their first date. A hazy summer’s evening on the South Bank when suddenly he’d taken her hand and led her away from the crowds, the street performers, the bookstalls, the bars and restaurants, down mossy stone steps to the river’s bank, where small groups huddled on the silty sand, smoke rising from a campfire, music from a busker’s guitar, the lights of the embankment trailing across the river’s surface, the last of the sun falling behind the city’s skyline. And when he’d kissed her she’d never felt so deliriously, stupidly happy. Not an expert in these things, she had fallen too deeply, too quickly, entirely forgetting to keep a part of herself back, to put a lifejacket on in case of emergency.