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SEVENTY

Jane Trevally had messaged Ash the previous day:

I know a great geek, a hacker, friend of my stepson. He can unpick the internet like a surgeon He’s going to find out where those fake reviews for Bar Amelie came from. Says to give him twenty-four hours

The online complaints about Bar Amelie from the woman who claimed to have been sexually assaulted there by a gay waiter were easy enough to find. They are everywhere, in every corner of the internet, from Tripadvisor to Google to chat rooms and forums.

Luke Berner himself had replied to her accusations on some platforms.

Dear Jennifer Smith,

We are sorry that you are still pursuing and perpetuating these unfounded allegations.

The member of staff in question has been interviewed by the police and released without caution.

We have CCTV footage which proves categorically that you were not assaulted on our premises.

We have eyewitness reports. This is part of a wicked vendetta against myself and our establishment and we will have no compunction about taking you to court over this matter if you do not desist immediately.

Luke Berner Owner/General Manager

As Ash heads out of the clothes agency now, toward the sandwich shop, her phone bleeps and it’s Jane.

He’s got her. Jennifer Smith.

LIVES IN TOOTING

Call me when you can

Ash gets her usual panini from the nice couple in the shop.

She pets their scruffy dog and finds herself regarding the couple a little less romantically as she waits for the panini to come out of the toaster.

The world, she now knows, is not what it seems. Nobody is what they seem.

Everything is an illusion. Maybe, she thinks, this perfect-looking couple are teetering on the edge of financial ruin, maybe she’s having an affair—maybe her partner isn’t even who he says he is, maybe he has another wife, has left abandoned children, death, and destruction in his wake.

She shakes these dark thoughts from her head as she crosses the road toward the beach, where she sits on her bench by the sea and lets the weak sunshine warm her skin while she unwraps the panini and clicks on Jane’s number. Jane answers immediately.

“Don’t ask me how he did it. Something to do with IP addresses.

I dunno. But her name is Amanda Law, she’s fifty-nine, she used to be an interior designer, quite famous in the nineties and noughties, did stuff for It Girls, Britpop stars, that kind of thing.

I googled her—quite pretty, very posh. She went bankrupt in 2006 and was last known to be working at an interiors store on Wandsworth Bridge Road.

Two grown sons, born in 1997 and 1999. And yes, I have her address. When can we go?”

Ash stares out at the channel, the surface soft and gray on this gentle January afternoon. Her heart is racing with excitement, and also nerves. She says, “I finish work at five. I can meet you at six thirty? Usual place?”

Amanda Law’s apartment is in a converted house in a small road off Tooting High Street.

The frontage is grimy and sad, and it does not look like the home of a famous interior designer.

Jane presses the bell for flat B and Ash feels a flutter of anticipation about what they might be about to encounter.

What sort of woman will she be, what sort of story will she have to tell, and how will she react to what she and Jane are about to tell her?

A voice comes onto the intercom and Ash jumps with a start.

It’s a man’s voice, and for a brief, terrifying moment she thinks it’s Nick—it has a similar tone and quality.

“Oh, hello,” says Jane. “We’re looking for Amanda Law? Is she in?”

“Who is this?”

“We’re old friends.”

“What sort of old friends?”

“Back-in-the-day friends. You know. From her Chelsea days.”

There’s a long silence and then the man comes back onto the intercom and says, “Hold on.”

Thirty seconds later, the door opens and there is a young man in front of them, and at the sight of him, Ash gives an audible gasp. He is the image of Nick Radcliffe: tall and broad, with a thick head of hair, a neat beard, those piercing blue eyes.

“I’m Sam,” he says, “Amanda’s son. Did you want to come in?”

They follow him up a scruffy staircase and through a door on the first floor into a small but very attractively decorated flat. Sam seats them on a sofa in a bay window and gets them glasses of water. Ash watches him in rapt fascination.

“So,” he says, eyeing them inquisitively, “you knew Mum back in the day?”

“Well, yes and no,” says Jane. “Or mainly—no. But I knew of her. We had friends in common. Lots and lots of friends in common. The nineties. The noughties. London. Chelsea. All of that. You know. And I loved her work. She was brilliant.”

“Yes,” says Sam. “She really was. Look.” He reaches behind him to a pile of books on a shelf and pulls out two coffee-table books, flicks through the pages, points out images of exquisitely designed rooms. “These are hers. Her work made it into a lot of books, a lot of magazines. She won awards, you know.” He closes it and then leans back into his chair and sighs.

“I assume,” says Jane, “that she’s not here?”

A pained look passes across the young man’s face. “Ha. No. No, she’s not here. She has not been here for a very long time. I live here now.”

“Where…,” Ash begins gently. “Where is she?”

“No idea,” says Sam. “She did a disappearing act. About four years ago? She started acting very strangely. I mean, she was already kind of delicate, you know? She always had been, since my dad died.”

Ash shakes her head slightly and says, “Sorry, you say your father died? When was this?”

“Oh, a very long time ago, when I was about seven? He died in a diving accident in the Philippines. Left my mum in loads of debt. Apparently, he took out lots of loans in her name, in her company’s name.

She couldn’t pay them off and that’s why her business went under.

She had to sell the place in Chelsea, move us here, and she never really got over it.

Never got over any of it. But she was doing OK, you know?

She was active in our lives, she had her job at the shop, she was OK.

And then, yeah, about four years ago she started acting very strangely.

She didn’t reply to messages, didn’t call, she forgot my birthday, she lost weight—and my mum couldn’t afford to lose weight, you know?

Behaved quite erratically. Then she became quite reclusive, stopped going to work.

We tried everything to help her, tried to get her to the GP for a referral for mental health issues, for therapy, you know, for anything.

And then one day after this had been going on for a few weeks, she messaged us both, me and my brother, and said she was leaving.

She couldn’t cope with London life, she couldn’t cope with responsibilities, she needed to get away.

She said she’d met a man, he lived in the Algarve, she was going to live with him, some sort of hippie retreat up in the hills.

I dunno, the whole thing sounded so bizarre.

But also—quite Mum? You know? Hippie retreats?

So we didn’t really question it at the time, but then her birthday came and went, Christmas came and went, my birthday, my brother’s birthday, no cards, no messages, nothing.

And then my brother wrote to tell her he’d got engaged and there was no reply.

And I dunno, we started getting a bad feeling, thought maybe this guy in the Algarve, whoever he was, maybe he’d trafficked her?

Killed her, even.” Sam flinches as he utters these words.

“So we got in touch with the police and filed her as a missing person and they told us”—he pauses and licks his lips, takes a sip of water and then puts the glass down again—“they told us the craziest thing. Apparently, a year earlier, a woman had come to my mum’s flat and then left twenty-four hours later and disappeared.

It was nothing to do with my mum, or at least I don’t think it was.

But it did coincide with the time that she started acting weird. ”

“Did the police tell you anything else about this woman? The one who came here?”

“Oh, only that she was looking for her husband. That she thought he was with my mum. Apparently she’d had a guy staying, according to the neighbors.

God knows what happened there or who she’d got mixed up with, but, yeah, this woman was reported missing by her daughter about a month or two later, and when they started to investigate, they got CCTV footage of this woman arriving at my mum’s flat and then leaving the next day.

Never to be seen again. No idea what happened to the guy either.

Case closed. And yeah… that was a bit of a shocker.

We didn’t push it. Didn’t ask too many questions, just in case my mum had, you know, got mixed up in something.

Anyway, the police dropped the case eventually, although the woman is still on file as a missing person.

And I wondered just now, when you said you were here to see my mum, maybe you knew something? Had something?”

Ash’s heart constricts with the knowledge that she is about to upend this guy’s life even more than it already has been. “Your dad,” she says. “Did he look like you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, my mum always said I was the image of him. My brother looks like my mum, but yeah. Look.” He jumps to his feet and pulls a photo album from the shelves behind him.

He peels through the pages and then turns the album toward them.

“Look,” he says, pointing at a handsome young man, clean-shaven, with thick dark hair, holding a toddler on his knee. “That’s my dad.”

Ash hears Jane draw in her breath. “What was his name, your dad?”

“Damian. Damian Law.”

“And you say he died, what, twenty years ago?”

“Yeah, round about that?”

Ash and Jane exchange looks and then Ash reaches into her bag and pulls out the printout of Nick Radcliffe’s LinkedIn photo, the photo from his obsolete life-coaching page, and a photo from her camera roll of him at their house on Boxing Day, looking hale and hearty in the back of the shot with a large glass of red wine in his hand.

She passes them to Sam and watches him anxiously, her stomach churning with the enormity of what she is doing to this human being whom she has only known for ten minutes.

She watches a symphony of emotions pass across his face, confusion, amusement, confusion again, then hurt, then anger, and finally he looks up from the photo and says to Ash, “What is this? Who is this?”

“This is a man called Nick Radcliffe who has lied his way into my mother’s life by pretending he knew my dead father.

He also pretended to be single and child-free, but is in fact married to another woman, called Martha, with whom he has a young child.

He has been with Martha for four years and before that he was married to a woman called Tara, who is the woman who was reported missing after leaving this flat four years ago.

He was also married to a woman called Laura, and they had two daughters he abandoned when they were very young and who are now teenagers.

He also…” Ash takes a huge gulp of air before speaking, to stop her voice from cracking.

“He also paid someone to kill my dad. And I’m really sorry, Sam, but I believe this man is… your father.”

Ash sees Sam gulp heavily as his eyes drop back to the pictures. “His hair, though. It’s white. I don’t…” Finally, he nods. “I mean, he got older. Yeah. He looks older—but how? I don’t understand.”

“You know,” Jane says thoughtfully, “I read somewhere that you can pay people in the Philippines to fake your death for you. Apparently, it’s a…

thing? I mean, is it possible that that’s what your father did?

That he faked his death. And then, for whatever reason, he came back into your mother’s life four years ago?

That he was the man your mum’s neighbors say they saw here, staying with your mother at that time. What did they say he looked like?”

Sam looks up at Jane with cloudy eyes. “They said…” He pauses, then starts again. “They said he was tall, with white hair and a short beard, about midfifties.” He gulps drily. Then he says, “Fuck.”

“I’m so sorry,” says Ash. “I just can’t… I mean, my father was murdered just over a year ago. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. And I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you, growing up without your dad. And to know that—”

Sam shakes his head and puts up a hand to ward off the rest of Ash’s sentence.

Then suddenly he is on his feet, sprinting, hurtling out of the room, feet heavy against the wooden floorboards, followed by the sound of a door opening, knees falling to the floor, and Sam vomiting thunderously into a toilet bowl.

Ash and Jane sit silently as he vomits three times in succession.

Ash has her eyes closed, Jane leans into the sofa and lets her head roll back.

This is awful, thinks Ash, just the most awful, awful thing.

To be here, to be present for it, to witness it, to be, however tangentially, a part of it.

It is overwhelming and terrible and too, too much.

“Oh God,” Ash whispers into the silence. She rocks forward and then back again. “Oh God.”

Jane reaches for her hand and holds it softly but firmly in hers.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Ash whispers.

“You mean Amanda? Dead?” Jane replies in a matching whisper.

Ash nods. “And killed by…?”

“Nick?” Jane mouths silently.

Ash nods again.

Then Sam appears, sallow, tear streaked, clammy. Jane passes him his water, helps him to his seat.

“Are you OK?” Ash asks.

He nods and then he clears his throat and says, “Where is he now? My father? Where is he?”

Jane looks at Ash and then back at Sam. “He disappeared,” she says. “About a week ago. He realized that Martha, his current wife, had worked out that he was with Ash’s mum and he did a runner. But we have a plan. OK? We’re working on it. Would you want to see him? You and your brother?”

Sam nods. “Yeah. I want to see him. Of course I want to see him.”

“Well, then,” says Jane. “Give me your number, and I’ll tell you what to do.”