The Lies He Told: A Gripping Psychological Suspense

By Valerie Keogh

One cheating man. Four angry women. One crime of passion. “A gripping and very entertaining” thriller from the bestselling author of The Perfect Life (Once Upon a Time Book Review).

Successful Misty is happy living with her perfect boyfriend until he tells her he is leaving.

Elegant Gwen is excited about the new man in her life until she discovers he’s been lying to her.

Angry Babs has the love of her life lured away, first by Misty then by Gwen, and she wants revenge.

Long-suffering Dee is a wife who takes her wandering husband back every single time.

When the lives of these four women collide, the results are deadly.

One thing is for certain, the consequences of lying will be murder . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781504070850

Valerie Keogh

Valerie Keogh is the internationally bestselling author of several psychological thrillers and crime series. She originally comes from Dublin but now lives in Wiltshire and worked as a nurse for many years.

Book preview

1

Misty

Toby Carter stood in the open doorway and waved to get my attention.

I dragged myself away from the characters that were coming to life under my fingers, took off the headphones I used to shut out the world when I was working and dropped them on the desk.

London had been struggling in a heatwave for over a week but Toby looked cool in his summer-weight suit, his white shirt still as crisp as when he’d left early that morning, his tie still in the Windsor knot he preferred. As always, his fringe fell across his forehead in an artfully casual way that I knew cost him a fortune to maintain.

I was stressed with a looming deadline but, as ever, the sight of him was the perfect antidote and as my tense shoulders slumped, the corners of my lips tilted upward in an automatic smile.

‘Hi, have you been home long?’

‘I don’t love you anymore.’

The words were said without inflection and for a second I thought I’d misheard. I had to have done… we were perfect together. A tinny, demented bumblebee buzz came from the discarded headphones. I wanted to be distracted, so picked them up and stared at them, anything rather than look across the room, anything rather than try to make sense of words that were baffling.

‘I don’t love you anymore,’ he repeated, a little louder, each word clearly punctuated.

I dropped the headphones, my eyes sliding reluctantly across the room. It was the bulging holdalls bracketing his shiny shoes that I saw first. I stared at them so that I wouldn’t have to look at his face and see the truth written in his eyes.

‘I’m sorry.’

Sorry. Was that what it came down to – a reduction to that one damn, miserable, pathetic word?

I was still staring at his bags as if the answers were in them struggling to get out. Maybe they were. Maybe he’d packed up all the answers… I should rush over and release them.

But before I could move, he bent and slipped his fingers through the handles. Long, strong fingers that had worked their magic on me so many times. He was taking them away… his fingers, the bags full of dreams, hopes and promises. All of it. Leaving me.

It was only then that I looked up and met his blue eyes. Startlingly blue and intense. Coloured lens. I discovered this the first night he’d stayed over and taken them out, the real colour an unremarkable pale blue. It was a touch of vanity that had amused me. I’d thought it had shown his vulnerability and had found it endearing. Now, I wondered if they were as fake and unreal as his promise to love me forever.

‘Here’re your keys.’ He held out the key ring I’d bought him. The one I’d had made for him. Our initials cut into stainless steel. M and T entwined together and designed to last forever. Like we were supposed to.

Two keys. One for the back door, one for the front. Lying together, as we’d done. Fitting neatly, as we had.

If he didn’t have the keys, he couldn’t come back. Couldn’t slip in beside me in the quiet of the night the way he’d done recently when he’d been delayed by meetings at work. Slip in beside me, wrap an arm around my waist, deliberately disturbing me so that I’d turn in his arms and he’d make love to me when I was barely awake, knowing the buttons to press to make me moan.

Couldn’t come back and surprise me in the middle of the day when he’d insist I needed to eat. He’d lure me away to a restaurant where we’d eat and drink and the remainder of the day would be lost in lust and love.

Couldn’t arrive home unexpectedly, open the door of my office quietly and slip across the room to wrap his arms around me, making me shriek in fright and dissolve in laughter as he howled with glee having caught me out again.

I stared at the keys and wanted to tell him to hold on to them… in case he changed his mind… in case he remembered the words he’d whispered, the ones where he swore he loved me and couldn’t live without me.

Instead, I held out my hand in an automatic response.

My chipped nails were a stark contrast to his perfectly manicured ones. Was that it? Had I let myself go? Too busy to be the perfect woman he’d met that first night… the successful, almost-famous girlfriend. Perhaps he’d finally realised that success… like fame… cost. My approaching deadline had meant longer hours recently, fewer expensive dinners out and weekends away. I’d explained and thought he’d understood. Perhaps he hadn’t… or maybe he had and decided the cost wasn’t worth his effort.

He dropped the keys into my outstretched hand, taking almost exaggerated care not to touch me as if afraid I’d grab him in a final desperate attempt to hold on. The entwined M and T were cold. I curled my fingers around them.

‘I’m moving in with a friend. I’ve sent the address to your mobile so you can forward any post, okay?’

Okay? Did he expect me to say yes, that everything was hunky-dory? I suppose he expected me to say something though, not simply sit there staring at the keys, the metal cold and hard, like the weight in my chest.

I was a bestselling author. One of my books optioned for a movie, another for a TV series. Words… they were my forte. But for the life of me I couldn’t find one appropriate thing to say bar the one word I refused to utter, the plaintive pathetic why I knew would release a dam of tears and recriminations.

Better to say nothing rather than that, to remain quiet rather than to beg him to reconsider and stay with me. Anyway, I could see by his set grim face that no words of mine no matter how suitable or erudite were going to change his mind.

The next few seconds were blank and numb. Only the pain from the keys and entwined-forever initials pressing into the soft flesh of my palm brought me back. The marks remained long after the echoes of his leaving had faded – the leather soles of his shoes slapping on the wooden hallway, the clunk of the front door as it shut behind him.

The words came then. A string of invectives and derogatory terms I usually reserved for the use of the worst of my fictional characters. The words echoed around the room and bounced off the walls, deafening and futile. I shouted until I was hoarse, then I released my clenched fist and threw the keys and the now-redundant key ring across the room. They crashed against the wall and slinked to the floor, landing beside the chunky glass paperweight I’d been given by my publisher the previous year.

What that was doing on the floor, I couldn’t think. But then nothing was the way it was supposed to be.

Leaving the keys and paperweight on the floor, I put my headphones back in place, turned the music up so loud it drowned out everything and went back to my book, to my characters, to playing God in a world where I had control.

2

Misty

It took me several hours to get back to my work after Toby cracked my world apart. Hours when I came up with the perfect words I could have said to him, words that would have sliced him and made him bleed. All too late, of course, the way those words frequently are.

The shade of my desk lamp was a green glow in the dark room, the light it threw over the keyboard a cold yellow. It would have made sense to get up and turn on the main light but I was afraid if I did, I’d not sit down again. And I needed to finish this book. It was due in by 8am and I’d hoped to have had it done hours before. Instead, it was almost 7.45 before I reached the last word, my eyes gritty with tiredness and the tears that had come after he’d left. Not before. I’d taken some pride in that.

Needles of pain pricking my right shoulder told me I’d been hunched over my keyboard for too long. I lifted my arm, rolled it and felt the muscles and tendons crunch. Today, along with all the other million and one things I’d been promising to do for the last few weeks, I might try to fit in a massage.

But first, I needed to send this manuscript to my publisher. It took a minute to frame a brief friendly email apologising for the very-last-minute delivery then, with the completed manuscript attached and after a few second’s hesitation where, as with every book to date, I wondered if I’d done enough, if I should maybe change the last paragraph, the first paragraph, the characters, the whole damn thing because I knew this time the book was rubbish, I hit send. And that was it. My eighteenth novel was done.

With a weary sigh, I dropped my headphones and glasses on the desk, switched off the computer and lamp and struggled to my feet feeling stiff from too many hours in one position. Too tired to do anything else, I left the small bedroom I used as an office and went next door to the room that had euphemistically been described as the master en suite in the sales details. Reality was a room swamped by a king-size bed and an en suite that was too small to be anything other than adequate.

Built-in wardrobes covered one wall. I’d made space at one end for Toby’s clothes, pushing mine to the far side. My clothes had become squashed, his taking up more space as the weeks had passed and he’d added to his extensive wardrobe on each of our frequent shopping trips. I’d considered buying a wardrobe for the spare bedroom but hadn’t got around to it. Luckily. I tried to sneer but failed and pressed my lips together to stop the tremble that would make me feel even more pathetic.

Toby had left the wardrobe door hanging open, the empty hangers inside a testament to my newly single status. Single… again. A slam of the wardrobe door set the hangers rattling. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sound so lonely.

I was dressed in what I referred to as my writing garb… a loose, comfortable kaftan which didn’t constrict as I hunched over the keyboard. I didn’t bother to remove it and dropped onto the bed behind. It was exhaustion that was turning me maudlin, making everything feel worse than it was. After a few hours’ sleep, I’d be saying ‘Toby who?’

With that optimistic thought in my head, I shuffled up the bed and dragged the duvet around and over me. Covering my head with it, cocooning myself. Tears prickled when I remembered other nights when I’d slept wrapped in Toby’s arms. I don’t like to let you go, he’d said. And I’d thought how lucky I was to meet a man so honest, so loving.

Now it was the weight of the duvet rather than his arms that comforted me and, despite everything, I drifted off to sleep.

It was the shrill ring of the phone that woke me, the sound only slightly muffled by the duvet. It took a few seconds to untangle an arm to reach the phone, searching fingers pulling it off the stand and under the covers to my mouth. ‘Hello.’

‘You got it done?’

It was Ann, my older sister. I pushed the duvet off my face and pulled a pillow down to prop up my head. ‘I did, with minutes to spare.’

‘As long as it’s gone. Welcome back to the land of the living.’

If it was the land of the living, why did I feel so dead inside? My head might have been hoping for Toby who? after a few hours’ sleep but my heart was still crying for loss it didn’t understand.

‘Hello, earth to Misty!’ Ann’s laugh tinkled down the line.

‘Sorry, I’m not quite awake yet.’

‘Get yourself into a cold shower, that’ll do it. It’s almost twelve. Lunch at two? Ursula is free, too, so we can do a big catch-up.’

I never argued with my sisters. There was no point, they were unstoppable forces, I never won. Agreeing to meet at our usual lunchtime haunt, I hung up.

Ann and Ursula, my sisters, were my best friends. Married in their early twenties to decent, hardworking, kind men who still adored them, they lived only a short drive or a long walk from my home in Hanwell. They tethered me to the normality I craved when, before Toby, I’d buried myself in my writing, living a fantasy life populated by make-believe characters. I’d argued with my sisters that it was safer, that the real world could be viciously painful.

But then I’d met Toby.

I curled up, pulling the duvet over my head again. I hadn’t really wanted to prove myself so spectacularly right. The real world was both vicious and painful.

‘Toby Bloody Carter.’ I almost spat the words out as I threw back the duvet and scrambled from the bed. It was good to have a reason to get dressed otherwise I’d have stayed in bed drowning in self-pity.

The frantic and always last-minute rush to get a manuscript completed by deadline was generally followed by a certain lassitude that would be harder to shake now that I was alone again. Alone. What a horrible word.

A minute later, I was under the shower, water as hot as I could stand it beating down from the large square shower head. Built for two. Toby’s words were so clear, I switched off the shower to listen for him, shivering foolishly as water cooled on my skin and memories of our naked entwined bodies floated on the steam.

‘It’s a cliché,’ I’d said to him the first time when he suggested joining me. ‘Every second-rate romance story has the couple showering together whereas the reality can’t possibly be romantic.’

He’d laughed and taken great pleasure in proving that cliché or not, sex in a shower with the right man was a magically unforgettable experience.

The right man.

I refused to cry but neither could I bring myself to sing a chorus of ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair’ as the water cascaded over me. The time would come when I’d accept I was better without him… but that time hadn’t come yet.

My pixie-style haircut needed nothing more than a rub with a towel and a comb through to look good, but I spent time choosing what to wear. It didn’t matter that Toby wouldn’t see me; it was important to show the world what he was willing to throw away so carelessly. Black trousers, white silk camisole, black linen jacket. And, of course, sky-high stilettos, the ones I’d been careful not to wear for fear of towering over the five-foot-nine Toby and thereby denting his ego.

It was a good look. Classy, slightly edgy, the dangling chandelier earrings I’d bought in India the previous year adding an arty touch. I dabbed concealer on the shadows under my eyes. Nothing I could do could hide the sadness that tugged at my lips and I hoped my all-seeing sisters wouldn’t notice.

I had a few minutes to spare before the taxi I’d ordered was due. Switching on my computer, I did what I’d been longing to do all morning. I pulled up Google Maps, checked the address Toby had sent me and typed it into the search. A street view showed me exactly what kind of salubrious address he’d moved to. Beaufort Gardens, Knightsbridge.

It took a moment for the tooting of a car horn to break through my seething and irrational envy.

When the taxi, double-parked on the narrow road outside, tooted a second time, I grabbed my oversized leather clutch bag and hurried out walking on the balls of my feet to prevent my stiletto heels catching in the cracks in the pavement.

I was always so damn careful so how did I get suckered in by Toby’s lies?

3

Misty

It was only a short ride to Tentelow Lane where the Three Bridges Restaurant overlooked a park of the same name. It was a favourite place to meet my sisters and normally I’d have dressed more casually and walked the mile or so in flat comfortable shoes enjoying the luxury of being outside, away from whatever I was working on. But that day, I needed the armour of fine clothes and heels.

Ann, my eldest sister, lived in Hounslow, and Ursula in West Ealing. About two miles away from the restaurant for both but they’d walk in flats, raise eyebrows when they saw my heels and shake their heads.

Then I’d tell them about Toby and they’d understand. They always did.

As usual, I was first to arrive. The waiter showed me to a table that overlooked the park and I sat with the first hint of pleasure in the day. It was the best time of year: the tall trees were in full leaf with lime-green leaves that shimmied in the slight breeze.

I ordered a bottle of Chenin Blanc without looking at the menu and it came almost immediately. The waiter left it sitting in the ice bucket as if assuming I’d wait for whoever was joining me at the table for three. Silly man. I reached for it, tossed the screwcap on the table, poured a glass almost to the brim and swiftly downed a couple of mouthfuls to reduce it to a more refined level.

The glass was almost empty before Ann came through the door, her mouth curving into a smile as she crossed to the table. ‘I’m not late, am I?’ She bent to give me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Aren’t you melting in that jacket?’

‘I didn’t walk here.’

‘Even so. It’s been the warmest July on record.’ Ann sat on the chair opposite, picked up the menu and fanned her face. ‘I walked, maybe I shouldn’t have.’ She was wearing a sleeveless cotton blouse, the smooth stretch of her upper arm marred by a telltale tan line. Ann was, at heart, a polo T-shirt and chinos type of woman.

She was also a woman of habit. I took the menu from her and wafted it back and forth gently. ‘I bet you left home late then had to hurry to catch up.’

‘You know me too well.’ Ann reached for the wine bottle. If she was surprised to see how much I’d already had, she said nothing and poured a small measure for herself before holding the bottle towards me. ‘More?’

‘Sure.’ I edged the glass closer to her, amused when she barely quarter filled it. Picking it up, I raised it towards her. ‘Cheers.’

‘To the success of your book!’ Ann tipped her glass against mine, took a sip and put it down. ‘So, are you taking a break before you start anything new?’

Maybe I was imagining things but the question seemed to have undertones. I was about to query it when my other sister arrived. Ursula was a year older than me and the wildest of the three of us. Certainly the most eccentric, describing her style as bohemian. She strolled across the restaurant in an off-the-shoulder blouse and matching floor-length skirt. Her mousy-brown hair was streaked with pink, and multiple bracelets on each arm created a noisy jangle as she waved wildly. Other diners raised their heads, then their eyes.

Ursula looked like she should be the artistic one but, in fact, she was an accountant. Her style, she insisted, was a survival mechanism to counteract what she referred to as her daily nine-to-five drudgery. In a cloud of floral perfume, she enveloped me in a hug before she flopped onto the third chair and reached for the wine bottle. Less reticent than Ann, her eyes widened at the little that remained and she darted a look at me. ‘You’re knocking it back a bit, aren’t you?’

Although she was right, I was irritated at the assumption. They thought they knew me so well. ‘It might have been Ann!’

Ursula laughed. ‘I bet Miss Sippy is still on her first glass.’

Ann lifted her wine. ‘You’re right!’

‘Fine, fine, yes, I’ve had a couple.’ I picked up my half-full glass, emptied it in two long gulps, then waved the empty glass and smacked it down