Little Liar: A nail-biting, gripping psychological thriller Read online

I pointed at the diary. ‘Give it to me, please.’

  The cheap, box-like contraption, sold as a ‘Secret Teen Diary’, contained a large pink notepad that was hidden behind a special battery-operated flip-door. It was her favourite possession. She wrote in it every day, delighting in the special code-pad that locked it up.

  ‘I was just finishing the page, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve pushed me too far this time,’ I said, shaking my head, trying to take it out of her hands.

  Rosie held on tight, wailing like a siren. ‘I’ve got to put the light back in properly!’

  I let go of it, allowing her to slowly and carefully press the mini plastic arm of the LED light into the slot above the diary door, and click the two pens into the side panel. Reluctantly, she handed it over.

  ‘Right. This is confiscated for a week,’ I said, putting the diary high on the top of her bookshelf.

  She let out a scream of protest. ‘You can’t confiscate it, Mummy! I need it.’

  I heard Noah’s door slamming. He probably knew what was coming, just as I did.

  * * *

  Standing stock still, I closed my eyes and crossed my arms over my chest. Her small fists pummelled at my thighs and her fingernails ripped at my shirt and her scream penetrated my brain like a thousand pinpricks.

  Her temper had shot from zero to one hundred in seconds.

  ‘Give it back!’ she yelped, leaping up pointlessly at the top shelf where her diary lay. ‘It’s mine!’

  As her piercing, high-pitched shrieking bore into me, I tried to disassociate. I dug my nails into my arms to counteract the pain Rosie was inflicting, to quell the panic that now mingled with the anger. I felt dizzy in the dark behind my eyelids. Opening them, I looked over Rosie’s head to fixate on the pretty polka-dot curtains I had chosen for her.

  During Rosie’s tantrums, when she loathed me with such ferocity, I lost that reassuring sense that I was in charge of my own destiny. That wail of hers! How it cut into me. While in the grip of it, she personified absolute chaos, carnage, collapse.

  ‘You can have it back in five days,’ I said, reducing the sentence, wishing I had not started this, wishing I had let her continue writing in her diary all night.

  ‘But I need it!’ she yelled back.

  The timer for my and Peter’s supper rang out from the kitchen. I tried to prize her limbs from my body to walk downstairs, but she slid along with my steps.

  I stopped walking, worried she’d hurl herself down the stairs. She circled me, tugging at me, hitting me, weakening the barrier of calm with every bruising throw of her fist. It was like the whole world stopped turning while that noise deafened me, echoed through the house, shaking the walls, piercing enough to break glass.

  ‘You don’t understand!’ she wailed. She lunged at the wreath she’d made which was now lying on her beanbag, and hurled it at me. It whizzed past my head and hit the banisters behind me, leaves and acorns coming loose.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I said, picking it up and putting it back on her beanbag.

  ‘It’s your fault!’

  ‘You threw it,’ I said, wondering why I felt the need to qualify that.

  She let out a shriek so loud it felt like my brain was splitting in two. ‘I HATE YOU!’

  I tried to move away again, to get downstairs to turn the oven off, but it would have been dangerous to go near the stairs while she was thrashing about at my feet.

  ‘Get out of my way,’ I said through clenched teeth. She clamped her arms around my ankles and writhed on the floor.

  ‘Daddy’s supper’s burning.’

  It was like having a rabid dog snap and bite and growl at my feet, while the noise of her screaming was like a bird squawking as it circled around my head. Fear and powerlessness overwhelmed me, and then a biting resentment took chunks out of my sense of reason until it was physically painful to resist retaliating.

  A black fog of rage rose from the pit of my stomach. I didn’t know how to stop her.

  ‘Get off me, Rosie.’ I tried to prize her off my legs, but her grip was too tight. I pushed her body away from mine, but she lashed out, leaping up and slapping at my head. The more I struggled the tighter she coiled herself around me. I was trapped. It was suffocating. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t find a way out.

  ‘THAT’S ENOUGH!’ I bellowed, deep, guttural and frightening.

  Violent images of my hand across her head flew into my mind. I wasn’t the kind of mother who hit her children. But the image came again and again. Every obstructive twist of her body around mine as I tried to walk downstairs to where our supper would be burning brought another appalling image of my hand at her head, my loss of control, my physical power against hers. My mind wiped out the abhorrent thoughts and a more superficial fury consumed me.

  I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her kicking and screaming back into her bedroom and onto her bed. I slammed the door, and held it shut. The panels bowed and cracked with each of her kicks. She pulled it open harder, and I slid along the carpet under her strength as I clung to the doorknob. I was completely out of control. As I tried to pull it closed again, her little arm shot through the gap and the door slammed onto it. I let go and she went flying onto the floor behind her.

  ‘You hurt me Mummy!’ she howled, cradling her arm, rolling around on the floor.

  ‘Let me see?’ I barked.

  She stopped writhing to show me her arm. The small, raised welt on her wrist sent a shock of guilt through me.

  ‘Can you move it?’ I asked, just to make sure.

  ‘It stings!’ she cried, flapping her hand back and forth easily. It was clear the injury wasn’t serious. Relief flooded through me.

  ‘Into bed, Rosie,’ I said, through gritted teeth, unable to show sympathy, unable to apologise, while she, too, was unable to back down. She resumed her rolling around. We were in deadlock.

  I left her there and stormed downstairs, away from her.

  The relentless screaming continued, emptying me out further, the stress killing me slowly, surely.

  Dry-eyed, I was desperate to cry, to be weak, to collapse, but I clung with both hands to the edge of the kitchen sink, terrified that if I let go I would fly at her in a rage.

  I would not cry. I never cried. I was Helen Campbell’s daughter. Campbell women didn’t do crying.

  I thought of Mira next door. Her kitchen window was only a few feet away from ours. During the renovations, Peter and I had decided to keep our drafty Crittal frames for the aesthetic, in spite of the flimsy glass. Now I wished we had thick double-glazed PVC. There were lights twinkling through the thinning hedge that separated our houses. Sometimes I could hear Mira chatting to Barry. If she had been standing in her kitchen now, or feeding the hens down the side alley, she would have heard me shout like that. It was shaming. Heat crossed my cheeks.

  And then I heard Peter’s voice. He was home. I pressed my fingers into my eyeballs and heaved a deep, deep sigh of relief.

  ‘What’s going on here, then?’ Peter said, jangling his keys. ‘I could hear you all the way down the road.’

  ‘Daddy! Come up here!’ Rosie cried from the landing. Her hero.

  I turned to see Peter perform an exaggerated march upstairs, swinging his arms like a soldier. ‘What’s all this racket about, young lady?’ he hollered officiously.

  Rosie giggled.

  I turned the oven off and I saw how my fingers shook. The skin of the chicken breasts was blackened. It would be inedible. Still, I moved on autopilot and brought two plates out and laid the knives and forks and poured two glasses of water.

  By the time Peter came down again, there was silence from Rosie’s room.

  He kissed me on the cheek, but I couldn’t look at him.

  ‘What’s she up to now?’ I whispered through clenched teeth, trying to control the tremor in my voice. I was raw from the after effects of rage. It still coursed through my veins, pumping my body with unwanted adrenalin. The flash
of Rosie’s red wrist sent a shiver of horror down my spine.

  ‘She’s in bed,’ Peter said, matter-of-fact.

  ‘Seriously? Why does she do it for you and not for me?’

  ‘I told her I’d buy her a cream egg.’

  I swivelled round and glared at him, our first eye contact of the day. ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’ he laughed. His well-mannered bone structure and the arresting clarity of his light grey-blue eyes were like a tonic on my soul. His pale hair had recently begun to recede. I thought it rather suited him. The peak at the front was ruffled to the side. His straight brow and long straight nose were a T-shape, lending his face grace and straightforwardness.

  That face of his; how I loved it.

  He reached for the bottle of Chablis in the fridge and two glasses from the cupboard.

  ‘Want one?’ he said.

  ‘I shouldn’t.’

  ‘A few sips won’t hurt.’

  ‘Go on, then. Just half,’ I said, taking the glass gladly.

  ‘Cheers big ears,’ he said, taking two large gulps as he checked his phone.

  The chilly acidic hit was instantly soothing.

  ‘Why are you home so late?’ It sounded like an accusation. I was still experiencing tremors of fury.

  ‘M25.’

  I felt bad. His commute in the car to and from his office every day was three hour round trip.

  ‘Sorry. That tantrum was hell on earth.’

  ‘It sounded like she was being murdered.’

  ‘Look what she did!’ I proffered my arm, showing him the red scratches.

  ‘Maybe you should tell her she can’t go to Charlotte’s birthday party.’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ I said. Honestly, I felt responsible for Rosie’s tantrum. I had confiscated her diary, which I knew was the one tool she used to get herself to sleep. I should have let it go. I had done it all wrong. I was the worst mother in the universe.

  ‘But she’s ten years old!’ Peter cried.

  ‘It’s normal. I’ve read about it loads online.’ I was back-tracking.

  But Peter went on. ‘If I’d treated my mum like that when I was her age I would have got a clip round the ear.’

  I was unable to tell him how uselessly I had managed her, how I had trapped her wrist in a laughable struggle, how I had imagined my hand whipping Rosie across her cheek to stop her screaming. It was horrifying to have had the thought, and even worse to think that I might have done it if Peter hadn’t arrived when he did.

  ‘It might have been a sugar high. Mum gave them two massive chocolate muffins before supper.’

  Perking up, Peter said, ‘Do you think Rosie might be sugar intolerant? I read about it in the papers the other day.’

  ‘You think?’

  It was easier to blame the sugar.

  ‘And she’s under a lot of pressure at school,’ I added.

  Peter looked over his wine glass at me as he sipped. ‘Yes, could be that.’

  Both of us wanted to believe this.

  ‘Or maybe it’s the baby? We only told her last week. She might have been stewing about it.’

  He laughed. ‘Remember when Noah came along, her hugs were a little terrifying?’

  Then Rosie’s feet padded down the stairs. Instantly, my hackles rose.

  Stay calm, let it go, I thought, taking another sip of wine, relying on it.

  ‘Can I just say sorry?’ she sniffed. ‘I love you, Mummy.’

  I kissed her head and drew her closer. Love for her returned to my heart like magic.

  ‘I love you so much too, you silly thing,’ I said, believing in her remorse.

  She tightened her little arms around me.

  My daughter was a livewire, she was unpredictable, but she was passionate and headstrong and beautiful, with her pastel-pink cheeks and straight hair down her back, as black as the night, and her huge eyes like a clear sky. The loathing and desperation I had felt only half an hour before were so far flung, so diminished, I wondered how it was possible to have felt that way at all.

  Chapter Four

  TOP SECRET

  * * *

  Dear Mummy,

  * * *

  Anne Frank writes Dear Kitty in her diary. I think Anne Frank pretends that Kitty is listening to her, even though she isn’t really. I can pretend that you are listening to me too even though all you do is tell me off. What would you do if you found me writing this now? It was easy to get it down from the shelf. I just stood on my stool. Like DUH!

  * * *

  I wish I could fix that wreath for Charlotte. It broke when I threw it. Charlotte said that if she doesn’t get a present from me tomorrow, she won’t let me come to her birthday party. And it is a BOWLING PARTY and her mum is making her HOMEMADE CHOCOLATE FUDGE CAKE!

  * * *

  I wonder what it would be like to have a mummy who makes chocolate fudge cakes, like Charlotte’s mummy? Granny Helen said to me that you choose your mummies and daddies. Noah believes her but I know she made it up. It is so silly. Even mummies and daddies don’t get to choose their children. WEIRD. Would you choose me?

  * * *

  INVISIBLE INK ALERT: I think I would definitely choose Charlotte’s mummy. She lets her play Strawberry Killer-Cakes on her phone at bedtime.

  * * *

  Better go. If you catch me, you will get cross with me ERRGAIN.

  * * *

  Love,

  Rosie

  * * *

  P.S. I am sorry for screaming again.

  P.P.S. I hate myself.

  P.P.P.S. My wrist doesn’t hurt so much now.

  Chapter Five

  At first, I didn’t recognise her. She was backlit by the garage sensor lights. I thought I had let a stranger in through the gates. Her hair was wet and slicked back, when usually it stuck up at the top like a crew cut.

  ‘Oh, hello Mira.’

  ‘Hello Gemma, I was just dropping by because...’ she began, but she didn’t look at me, she looked past me, into the hallway behind me. ‘I wondered if Peter was here?’

  ‘Yes, he’s watching telly. Do you want me to get him?’

  I was desperate for her to leave, wished I’d never answered the doorbell. The last thing I needed was Mira. The noise of the gates opening and the gravel under her heavy step could rouse Rosie again, and if she started up again, I would shoot myself.

  ‘Oh, right.’ She paused as if listening out for him. She pulled her fleece tightly around her chest. ‘It’s just he offered to lend us the lawnmower. Ours is broken.’

  ‘How is Barry working without a lawnmower?’

  ‘Oh, most of his clients have sit-on-tops,’ she replied absent-mindedly, moving from one foot to the other, taking another peek beyond me, into my house.

  ‘Right. I’ll just go get him.’ I checked my watch, thinking it was rude of her to drop round so late to ask about the lawnmower. I had just put two salmon steaks in the oven, and I didn’t want them to burn like the chicken had.

  ‘Oh, okay, yes,’ she replied, as if she wasn’t quite sure why she was there all of a sudden.

  And then I clicked. She must have heard my fight with Rosie. I felt the damp seep through my stretched sleeves, which were clenched in my fingertips, the wool sticky in my palms. This wasn’t a casual visit from Mira. This wasn’t to notify us that we had waited too long to cut the hedges; to tell us that we had left our bins out on the wrong day; to inform us that the house alarm had rung for an hour before the police had turned up; to inform us of how many lights we’d left on while we’d been away; to pass comment on how much fun we seemed to be having at the dinner parties we held. I could tell by her demeanour.

  Generally, Mira was jolly, ruddy and chatty; the kind of woman who makes homemade biscuits to put in the blue bucket for the cheeky little girl next door. Now, in the murky glow of my half-lit hallway, she stood wide and seemed edgy. If I turned her away, or made excuses, I would look like I had something to hide. Did I
have anything to hide?

  ‘Would you like to come in for a glass of something? Peter has opened a bottle already.’

  ‘Oh, okay, if it’s not too late?’

  ‘No, no, do come in.’ Yes, nine o’clock is too late when you have to get up at five thirty, I thought.

  She was looking around at the shiny fittings and furniture as though a nasty surprise lurked ready to jump out at her. I saw my house through her eyes. It was probably unnecessarily luxurious. Too much velvet and crisp linen; too many expensive surfaces and designer lines.

  Mira sat down at the kitchen table, wobbling it. The unsettled flame of the scented candle let out a plume of black smoke.

  ‘Lovely kitchen,’ she said, taking a sip of wine.

  ‘Thanks, we had it done last year by a dad at the kids’ school. If you want to do yours, I’ll text you his number, if you like, he’s really good. He sourced really cheap work surfaces for us. I mean, usually they cost a fortune. Just let me know,’ I droned, trailing off, knowing she wasn’t the kind of woman to update her kitchen. She probably thought I was such a cliché.

  ‘We’ve still got Barry’s mum’s kitchen. The cupboards are an ugly old mush green but they do the job.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I’m sure. It doesn’t really matter, does it? I mean, honestly, I never used to care about what my kitchen units looked like. Now, I don’t know, it kind of seems like the thing to do round here. Like I might have fewer friends if I didn’t have a nice kitchen,’ I laughed, only half-joking. Her presence was unsettling me.

  Mira cocked her head at me sympathetically, as if I had made a confession. I suppose I had, in a way. In this small town, the obsession with house renovations and the talk of it at dinner parties had probably got to me, on some level. Perhaps it had turned me without me noticing. I filled my empty wine glass with fizzy water, aware that the half-glass of Chablis had gone straight to my head.