Deceive Me Page 12

  ‘Why didn’t Tom tell us about this before?’ I ask, looking from Chris to Dino.

  Dino taps his finger on his desk. ‘He claims that he didn’t check his mailbox so he hadn’t read the letter.’

  I think about this. It’s plausible, I suppose. The post in our village comes rarely – about once a week. I often forget to look inside. But I still feel that there’s something not right about that letter.

  ‘I wouldn’t believe a word that little shit says,’ fumes Chris, narrowing his eyes. ‘Why don’t you tell the detective what Hakan told you?’ he adds, turning to me.

  I roll my eyes and bite back annoyance. I hadn’t decided yet whether or not to share what Hakan had told me with the police, but now it seems I have no choice. Dino is looking at me, waiting expectantly.

  ‘Grace told a friend that someone had committed a crime,’ I say. ‘Do you know anything about that?’

  ‘No.’ Dino leans forward. ‘She said that? Do you know what the crime was?’

  I shake my head. ‘No. Just that it was serious. Do you think she could have been talking about Tom?’

  Dino jots something down on a piece of paper. ‘Maybe. It’s certainly very interesting. We’ll look into it.’ He chews his pen. His eyes stray to Chris thoughtfully. ‘Tom doesn’t have a criminal record, though. We checked.’

  I glance anxiously at Chris. The mention of a criminal record will set him off for sure, I think. But, to do him credit, he manages to control himself, speaking quietly, his anger, for the moment, simmering away below the surface.

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Just because someone doesn’t have a criminal record, doesn’t mean they can’t commit a crime and just because they do, doesn’t mean they’re going to commit another. By the way, someone leaked some information about me to the press . . .’

  ‘Oh?’ Dino looks confused.

  ‘Yes, well, that doesn’t matter now,’ I say hurriedly. ‘Can we keep this copy?’ I ask Dino, picking up the letter and standing up. I know from experience that I need to get Chris out of here before he works himself up into a rage. ‘Thank you for all you’re doing to help find Grace.’ I flash a smile at Dino and wave the paper. ‘This is great work.’

  He smiles back, looking gratified. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he says. ‘I feel sure that we are going to find her very soon.’

  Chris and I step out into the bright midday sunshine and the heat wraps itself around us. We walk along in silence for a while, each lost in our own thoughts. My head is swimming. The road is clogged with traffic and traffic fumes and it feels hard to breathe.

  ‘It’s a motive,’ says Chris suddenly, stopping outside a cheap boutique. His face is drenched in sweat. He looks like he’s about to pass out.

  ‘What?’ I don’t have the strength to help Chris right now. Right now, we’re like two people drowning with only each other to cling on to. Feeling faint myself, I lean against the window steadying myself, staring blankly at the lacy black lingerie in the window.

  ‘The letter gives Tom a motive,’ Chris says slowly. ‘I know he said he hadn’t read it, but what if he lied about that? If he had read it, imagine how he must have felt. He would’ve been fuming. It would explain the fight he had with Grace on Saturday night.’ He wipes his face with a tissue and stares at me. ‘God, if he’s hurt her’ – his voice rumbles with anger – ‘I swear I’ll kill him.’

  ‘She was fine on Sunday,’ I remind him. I put my hand to my head. I’m getting another headache. ‘And we don’t know when the letter was written.’

  ‘Even so, we should speak to him.’

  ‘You said we should leave the investigating to the police.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I changed my mind,’ Chris says grimly. ‘That guy couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.’

  Chapter 21

  We find Tom down at the marina tethering his boat. He’s in his wetsuit, peeled to the waist. Sleek wet hair clings to his neck and his blue eyes catch the sun. He looks healthy and vibrant. He shouldn’t look so good, I think resentfully. He should be broken like us. But here he is carrying on with life like nothing’s happened and there’s no outward sign of the trauma that he should be feeling. He doesn’t care about Grace. Not really. Not the way I do. How can he? He’s only known her a couple of years whereas I’ve loved her all her life.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, straightening up and shielding his eyes from the sun. ‘Mrs Appleton . . . Mr Appleton.’

  He shakes our hands and Chris eyes him up like a boxer before a fight. ‘We need to talk,’ says Chris. ‘Have you got time for a coffee?’ His tone is deceptively polite. Anyone else would be fooled. But I know him too well. I know the way he bottles up his anger, compressing it into a tighter and tighter space until it explodes.

  Who would win in a fight between Tom and Chris? I wonder. Tom has the advantage of youth, but Chris is heavier, thicker set. My money’s on Chris. I picture him punching Tom in the face and realise that I wouldn’t mind seeing that.

  ‘Sure,’ Tom says evenly. He tucks his wet hair behind his ear. ‘I’ll just get changed.’

  He disappears into the bowels of the boat and Chris and I wait, watching the cats that congregate on the jetty sunning themselves and looking at the sailing boats, their rigging clinking in the wind.

  A few minutes later Tom reappears wearing shorts and a faded green T-shirt that says Insert logo here. His hair is tied up in a knot and his phone is shoved into his pocket, earphones poking out the top.

  ‘Is there any news about Grace?’ he asks as we walk along the beachfront to Fini’s Bar.

  ‘In a way, yes,’ says Chris grimly. ‘The police found a letter in your apartment . . . But you know about that.’ We both look across at Tom to watch his reaction to this news.

  ‘Oh that.’ Tom winces. He looks suddenly sad and lost like a little boy. And for a second, just a second, I almost feel sorry for him. I know all too well what it’s like to bask in the sunshine of Grace’s love and affection and then to suddenly have that love withdrawn.

  When we reach Fini’s Bar we sit at a table looking out at the sea. Chris orders beer for himself and Tom and a Coke for me. There’s a heavy silence as we sip our drinks. We’re all lost in our own thoughts. Chris glares out at the sea, then turns suddenly on Tom.

  ‘Why did you lie?’ he says. His voice is quiet but full of menace. Not for the first time I’m glad that Chris is my husband. Chris is a good person to have on your side. I wouldn’t like to have him as an enemy.

  ‘What?’ Tom’s hands flutter nervously. He looks frightened. Not surprising, I suppose, under the circumstances. It doesn’t necessarily mean he has anything to hide.

  ‘You told Jo and the police that you last saw Grace on Saturday night, but your neighbour says she was at your flat on Sunday evening.’ Chris’s hands clench, his expression grim. I put my hand on his knee to remind him to tone it down. Tom doesn’t have to talk to us if he doesn’t want to. We don’t want to scare him away.

  Tom puts his glass down. His hand is trembling slightly, but he looks at us defiantly. ‘My neighbour must have made a mistake because I was out on Sunday. All day. I took a party of tourists out on the boat and then I went to my friend’s flat-warming in Nicosia. I asked Grace if she wanted to come but she said no’. Frank blue eyes hold mine and I look away.

  ‘And your friend can confirm that, can he?’ Chris leans forward, resting his elbows on the table.

  ‘Yes, of course . . . I’ve got his number.’ Tom fumbles nervously with his phone, scrolls through and scribbles down a name and number on a napkin. ‘His name’s Nick. Call him if you like.’

  ‘Oh, I will, don’t you worry.’ Chris gives a nasty grin and slots the napkin into his back pocket. He takes a sip of beer. ‘What time did you get back from the party?’ he asks.

  ‘I stayed over. I didn’t want to drink and dri
ve. I didn’t get back until midday on Monday.’ Tom looks over at me. ‘I’d only just got back when you came around looking for Grace.’

  Chris raises a sceptical eyebrow. ‘So how come your neighbour saw Grace at your flat on Sunday evening?’

  Tom opens his mouth to answer and then closes it again as Chris bulldozes on.

  ‘It looks pretty suspicious, you’ve got to admit. You said you invited her to go with you to your friend’s house, so she must have known you were out.’

  Tom stares at him sullenly. ‘Are you accusing me of something?’ he says, standing up and pushing his chair back. ‘Because I don’t have to listen to this.’

  ‘No, please stay,’ I say, giving Chris a warning look. ‘We’re not accusing you of anything. Of course we’re not. We’re just trying to understand what’s happened, that’s all. We’re all on the same side here. We all want to know what’s happened to Grace, don’t we?’

  He hesitates, clenches his fists tightly into a ball, then, to my relief, sits down again with a sigh.

  ‘Yes,’ he says reluctantly. ‘Look, I don’t know why Grace was at my house on Sunday night. Maybe she forgot that I said I was going out. How should I know? Maybe that was when she put that letter in my post box.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that Grace had finished with you?’ I ask gently.

  Tom flinches, and a mixture of hurt and anger shows on his face. ‘That’s because I didn’t know when I last spoke to you,’ he says. ‘It was the police who found the letter. I don’t check my post box all that often. The post doesn’t get delivered very frequently so there’s no point.’

  ‘Do you know why she called things off?’

  He shrugs and looks away, but not before I see that his eyes have filled with tears. I wait for him to compose himself. When he turns back, he seems more in control. ‘I don’t understand it at all,’ he says. ‘I thought everything was fine between us . . . I mean, we had an argument on Saturday night, but I thought that was all sorted.’

  ‘Yes, the police told us that you had a fight,’ I say carefully.

  His eyes narrow warily. ‘Well, I wouldn’t describe it as a fight exactly, more of a disagreement.’

  ‘It must have been a pretty loud disagreement if the people in the flat below could hear you,’ Chris says, and I kick his leg under the table. Tom bristles but, to my relief, stays sitting. Tom and Chris stare at each other. Tom scared but defiant. Chris angry as hell and barely controlling it.

  ‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t a physical fight if that’s what you’re hinting at,’ Tom says.

  ‘What did you disagree about?’ I ask, stressing the word disagree.

  Tom stares out at the horizon, not answering. Is he buying time to think, I wonder, or battling difficult emotion? He squeezes his bottom lip between his thumb and his forefinger. The gesture reminds me strangely of Grace and I feel a sharp stab of longing in my chest.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ he says at last. ‘I was going back to the UK and Grace wanted to go with me. But I didn’t think it was a good idea for her to take so much time off school. I said that she’d have to ask you.’

  ‘That’s big of you,’ Chris says sarcastically.

  Tom ignores him and continues, looking at me. ‘She was really angry about it. She said that if I really loved her, I would want her to be with me no matter what.’

  I can easily imagine that. Grace can be fierce and dogged when she sets her mind on something. More than once throughout her childhood we’ve given in to her just for a quiet life. It must have taken some strength of personality on Tom’s part to refuse her. But perhaps he didn’t want her with him, after all. Perhaps he’d grown tired of her.

  ‘Were you returning to England permanently?’ I sit back, chewing a nail thoughtfully.

  ‘No, but it would have been for a while. My mother, she received some bad news recently and she needs me at home. She’s on her own now.’ A shadow flits across his face. ‘I don’t know whether you know, but my stepdad passed away last year.’

  ‘Grace did mention it. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s brought it all back, all the grief she felt when we lost my sister . . .’ He tightens his fists. ‘And then my dad.’

  Chris is battling conflicting emotions. I can see in his easy-to-read face the way he’s squashing any sympathy he feels for Tom.

  ‘Why aren’t you in the UK now then? If your mother needs you there?’

  There’s a flash of anger in those pretty blue eyes. ‘The police won’t let me go,’ Tom says. ‘They think I had something to do with Grace disappearing.’ He looks at us both square in the eyes. ‘But I didn’t. I would never hurt Grace, I swear. I love her.’

  ‘I don’t buy it,’ says Chris as we head back to the car park. ‘It makes no sense at all. Why would she be begging him to let her go with him to England one day and breaking it off the next? You don’t fall in and out of love in one day.’

  Don’t you? I certainly didn’t fall in love with Chris in one day. That was a slow burner. But Grace’s father was a whole different story.

  Chapter 22

  2000

  I think about him constantly. When I wake up, he’s in my head. And when I play with Adam, I look for signs of him in Adam’s broad cheekbones, the soft, shy looks he gives and the sudden bursts of laughter that shake his whole body. When Adam cries because he’s scared of the dark, I wonder if Hakan’s afraid of the dark too and, when I comfort him, I imagine I’m comforting Hakan.

  It’s just a crush, I tell myself. The kiss didn’t mean anything. It was the kind of kiss you might give a child. Nothing has happened. But at night I find myself going over and over it in my head, unpicking the moment. Freeze-framing it. The meeting on the path, the sunlight trapped in his eyes, the feel of his dry lips brushing against mine. In my fantasies he doesn’t stop, but he kisses me again like a lover, cupping my chin with his hand, and we melt into each other’s arms.

  I’ve had sex only once, with a boy in my class called Darren. It was nothing like the romantic experience I’d imagined it would be. He spent a long time fumbling with the condom and when he finally shoved himself into me it was painful and over within seconds. But the lovemaking with Hakan in my head is nothing like that. In my head, he tells me he’s never desired a woman like he desires me. He kisses my neck, then my shoulders and our clothes evaporate by magic. I know it’s just a fantasy and the reality, if it ever happened, would probably be nothing like that. But there’s no harm in dreaming, is there? Thinking isn’t the same as doing. Nothing will ever happen anyway. He’s married to Helen. He would never be seriously interested in a girl like me when he has a woman like Helen.

  I look in the mirror every morning and find a lot of faults. My face is too square, and my thighs are too chunky. I’m crazy to think someone like Hakan would ever look twice at me. And yet he does. Secretly, when he thinks no one’s watching.

  He’s looking at me now, as I stand on the beach cupping the tiny turtle in my hands, and his look takes my breath away. He’s looking at me fascinated, as if I’m something rare or as if he’s just solved a difficult equation. I blush and look away at Adam, who’s hopping up and down in excitement.

  ‘Can I hold it? Can I?’ he says.

  I look at the volunteer, a round-faced girl about my age, maybe a couple of years older. She nods, and I show Adam how to cup his hands. ‘You must hold it firmly but not too tightly. You don’t want to hurt it.’

  ‘This little guy is a green turtle,’ says the volunteer, whose name is Amber. ‘We think that green turtles live on average eighty years – though it’s difficult to estimate exactly how long they live . . .’ She goes on to spout a series of facts about turtles. I am only half listening. Most of my mind is focused on Hakan. He’s not looking at me now but at Amber, a half-smile on his lips, but I can tell that he’s aware of me – the same way I’m aware of him.


  Amber lifts a cloth off a bucket full of baby turtles clambering over each other and the small group of tourists gathers around.

  ‘Only one per cent of these little guys will survive to sexual maturity,’ she says, ‘which is why it’s so vitally important that a large number of hatchlings make it to the sea.’

  We all turn off our torches so the turtles won’t be confused by the lights and then we’re each given a baby turtle and we place them on the sand near to the sea. Adam hops up and down excitedly as the baby turtles stumble along the beach. A couple veer off course and we steer them back in the right direction. Adam holds on to his, refusing to let go.

  ‘I want to keep it,’ he says. ‘Can’t I keep it?’

  ‘Sorry, son, you can’t,’ says Hakan, gently unfurling Adam’s little hand. ‘He won’t be happy. He wants to be in the sea with his brothers and sisters.’

  It’s pitch-black as we make our way back to the car and Adam falls asleep as soon as his head hits the car seat.

  We drive back in silence along an unlit dirt road, a few sparse trees lit up like ghosts in the headlights. We’re in the middle of nowhere here and it feels like we’re all alone at the end of the world. All I can hear is the sound of the car engine and Adam snoring softly in the back. I allow myself the fantasy that we’re a family, Hakan, Adam and me, and that Helen doesn’t exist.

  ‘It was good of you to come with us,’ says Hakan, interrupting my thoughts as we bump over ruts in the ground.

  ‘I wanted to come.’

  ‘Seriously, though, you should be out having fun.’ Hakan stares straight ahead at the road. ‘You should have a boyfriend . . .’ There’s a silence. ‘Aren’t there any boys you like?’

  ‘Not really.’ Not boys, I think. And I’m glad it’s dark because he can’t see my face, which is hot.