Trust No One Read online

  Afterwards, when he’d driven off, she sat in her car for a while, wondering whether she knew what she was doing. She was only following Salter’s instructions, she told herself. And even if her own instincts about Jake were off the mark, it was still the smart thing to do. Take the opportunity, find a way into the inner circle, get closer to Kerridge.

  But she couldn’t fully fathom her own motives. She was attracted to Jake, of course. She couldn’t deny that. And not just to Jake himself, but to what he might be able to offer. Warmth, friendship, company, fun. And maybe sex, she added quietly to herself, as if that was nothing more than a half-joke, an afterthought. But, above all, something straightforward. No strings. No expectations. No ties.

  And that was where things became tangled in her head. Because she felt, in her heart, that this wasn’t going to be simple. Again today, she’d had the sense that he was going through the motions, reluctantly doing Kerridge’s dirty work. Quite how dirty that work might get, she didn’t like to think. But her instincts still told her that Jake wasn’t happy, that he was looking for something different.

  And maybe she could help him find it. But she knew that, if she did, nothing would ever be simple again.

  That second meeting with Jake had been just before another, very different weekend that she’d spent at home with Liam. It had been her first weekend back. She’d deliberately avoided going home too frequently during those early weeks, much to Liam’s irritation. Of course, he’d read the worst into her decision, but really it was just that she wanted to allow herself time to get into the swing of her new life. She had known that it would be difficult, juggling these two identities, establishing a new reality for herself in Manchester. She’d been advised, by Salter and others, that the first couple of months would be critical. ‘It’s like driving a car,’ Salter had said during one of their preparatory meetings, his tone suggesting that this might be a concept unfamiliar to a woman. ‘When you first start, you have to think about everything. How to steer. When to change gear. How much rev to give it . . .’

  ‘I know what’s involved in driving a car, Hugh.’

  He’d nodded sceptically, then continued. ‘It’s hard work because you have to concentrate all the time. But after a while you stop thinking about it. It becomes second nature. It’s the same with this business.’

  It was a trite analogy, she’d thought at the time. But he’d been right. Those first few weeks she’d felt exhausted every night. It was partly because she was learning a new business, a new trade. Not just the printing, but everything involved in running the shop. Payroll. Tax. VAT. Bookkeeping. Invoicing. Taking orders. Preparing tenders. Costing up a job so they could actually make a profit on it. Cold-calling and following up prospects. Chasing the slow payers. A new world that she’d vaguely known existed, but had never had reason to explore.

  All that was tiring enough. But the really hard part was the concentration needed to sustain her new identity. As Salter had implied, it wasn’t a difficult task in itself. After all, like all the best lies, her legend had been designed to be as close as possible to the truth. She’d stuck with her own name – it had been known for officers to answer to the wrong one – and most of the details of her past had been left broadly unchanged. She knew that, back at the ranch, they’d spent a lot of time carefully checking online to make sure that she’d wouldn’t be exposed by some out-of-date Facebook page or Google reference. The aim, from the start, had been to make her new life as effortless as possible.

  That was the theory. But she was acutely aware of the mistakes she’d made during training, infrequent as they’d been. The odd passing reference to Liam or to some real-life work colleague. Some comment that didn’t quite square with who or what she was meant to be. Most had been trivial, and probably wouldn’t have been noticed by a casual listener. But she’d watched herself on the video replays and realized how easy it was to make an error. And, as the trainers had repeatedly emphasized, even one error could be one too many.

  So she spent those first weeks thinking carefully about every word she spoke, hesitating before she opened her mouth. Constantly reminding herself that ‘Marie Donovan’ up here was, in some critical ways, a different person from the Marie Donovan back home. At the end of the day, she just wanted to hide herself away, safe inside her flat where there was no danger of saying or doing the wrong thing.

  She’d been advised that the best approach for the first month or so was simply to immerse herself in it. She had to become the new Marie Donovan to the point where she no longer had to think about it. Unconscious competence, Winsor the psych had called it, as he talked her through a more sophisticated version of Salter’s driving analogy.

  She’d decided therefore that she couldn’t afford to interrupt her immersion by paying repeated visits back home. That would just make the whole process even harder. Liam hadn’t been pleased – well, of course he hadn’t, she acknowledged now – but she’d pointed out that once she’d got through this initial acclimatization she’d be able to establish a routine of regular visits home.

  He’d grudgingly accepted that, but set a deadline of a month for her first trip back. She’d planned to leave Friday lunchtime, telling Joe that she was visiting her elderly parents back in London. Almost inevitably, things hadn’t gone smoothly. They’d had to redo a large print job because of some technical fault with the machine, and she’d finally got away later than she’d intended. She had taken the train from Piccadilly rather than facing the Friday night traffic on the M6, and though it wasn’t quite peak time, the carriages were already tightly packed. With no reservation, she’d eventually found a seat next to an overweight man who made no great secret of his resentment at having to move his bag from the spare seat beside him. She’d reached Euston at the tail end of rush hour only to find that the Northern Line was up the creek, the trains sporadic and full.

  It was gone seven thirty when she finally arrived at their South Wimbledon house, at least a couple of hours later than she’d expected. She’d been updating Liam periodically throughout the journey, but still he’d seemed to treat her late arrival as a personal affront.

  ‘I was going to book us a table somewhere,’ he said, looking pointedly at his watch.

  ‘You still can,’ she pointed out. ‘What about the Italian?’

  ‘They’ll be booked up by now,’ he said. ‘Friday night, after all.’

  She considered some sarcastic rejoinder, then decided just to go with the flow. He was only pissed off because he’d wanted her back earlier, she told herself.

  ‘Let’s just do the pub, then,’ she said. ‘We can grab a bite there. Better than ringing around the other places trying to find a table.’

  He looked for a moment as if he were about to argue, then smiled. ‘Yeah, why not? It’ll be more fun than some overpriced pasta, anyway.’

  As it turned out, it was quite a lot more fun. She hadn’t realized, until she arrived back here in her home environment, quite how tense and constrained she’d felt in Manchester. It was as if she’d thrown off some ill-fitting garment and was finally able to breathe properly. At another time, she might have expressed her tiredness by getting irritated with Liam, but tonight all that seemed to melt away. Liam played it just right for her mood, cheerfully pulling her back into the moment, not bothering her with questions about how it had all gone.

  Home. That was what this was. Not just the poky little Edwardian terrace that was all they’d been able to afford in this part of London. But all of it: Liam; the Irish pub round the corner that, unlike virtually every other pub in London, really did feel like a local; the neighbours that she hardly knew but who nodded to her and Liam from the surrounding tables as they entered the bar.

  She hadn’t realized till that moment quite how isolated she’d felt for the past few weeks. It wasn’t only that she was living alone in that anonymous apartment block. It wasn’t that, apart from Salter and Joe in the print shop, there was no one up there that she’d even been able
to call an acquaintance. In the end, it was the fact that she was living a lie. She’d become a person without a past, without a context, without, in the long run, a future even. She wasn’t a great one for nights out with the girls, but down here there’d at least been a few female colleagues who she could join for a drink or two after work, some old college friends that she saw less often than she ought to. There was a life outside the job.

  Up there, there was nothing. She couldn’t afford to go out and make new friends, even if she’d wanted to. She couldn’t take the risk of letting people too far into her fictitious life in case they spotted something that didn’t fit or decided that they wanted to know more about her. Once or twice, Joe had suggested going for a pint after work, his manner suggesting that he was inviting her simply as a workmate, rather than with any other intention. She’d eventually taken him up on the offer, but only because she’d thought it would seem odd to keep refusing. That had been OK. Joe himself was hardly the most forthcoming of individuals. But she’d spent the evening on tenterhooks, nervous of saying the wrong thing or simply of saying too much. It had been OK, but nothing like this.

  ‘Penny for them,’ Liam said, raising his pint in a mock toast.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Still thinking about the job. Takes a while to shake it off.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ he said. ‘Though probably nothing that a few drinks won’t cure.’

  She laughed. ‘Worth a shot, anyway. Nothing to lose.’

  The evening had gone on from there. She followed Liam’s advice and had those few more drinks, and she’d found that, yes indeed, all the stresses and strains of the job had quite quickly evaporated. They ate some forgettable pub lasagne, which she found surprisingly enjoyable, if only because, unlike most other meals she’d eaten over the last month, it wasn’t some ready meal she’d bought from the Tesco Metro around the corner. They chatted amiably about this and that, somehow managing to steer clear of anything that would have changed the mood, like Liam’s illness or her career. And finally, not long before closing time, they’d staggered back to their small house, gone to bed and made tipsy love, falling asleep in the warmth of each other’s bodies.

  It was only in the small hours, suddenly awake with Liam breathing steadily beside her, that she suddenly thought about Jake Morton. He hadn’t entered her mind all evening, almost as if she’d deliberately boxed him away in some far corner of her head.

  She’d agreed to go out for a drink with him the following week. Well, so what? It was nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about. It was part of the job, following Salter’s instructions. Building her network, just as when she’d attended Kerridge’s charity dinner.

  But she’d told Liam about that. She’d presented it as the tiresome chore it had been, and afterwards they’d had a good laugh over the phone about the naffness of the charity auction, the aspirational pretensions of Cheshire business folk at play. She’d talked about the fat middle-aged men who’d kept trying to entice her on to the dance floor, and about her role as Kerridge’s top-table eye candy. She’d told Jake about every over-ornate frock, every ill-fitting tuxedo.

  But she hadn’t mentioned Jake.

  There had been no reason for her to, of course. He was just someone she’d happened to sit next to. A brief acquaintance with whom she’d shared some polite chit-chat. Someone she probably wouldn’t see again.

  But now she was going to see him again. Not just as a passing acquaintance or as a business contact. She was going to see him for what she was sure Jake himself would see as a date. And she knew that, whatever her supposed good intentions, whatever she might tell herself about this being part of the job, there was at least a small part of her that wanted to see it the same way.

  She rolled over, pulling the duvet more tightly around her. Christ, why should she feel guilty about all this? She was just doing her job. OK, she felt some attraction to Jake. She was only human. Alone, a long way from home, struggling with a new life. No one could blame her for being tempted. But that was all it was. She wasn’t going to do anything about it.

  For a long while, she lay awake, her mind empty but stubbornly refusing to shut down. Outside, she could hear the occasional hum of a car along the High Street. Inside, there was nothing but Liam’s rhythmic breath, the slow clicking of the cooling radiators. It was nearly dawn before she finally slept.

  She awoke late. Liam was already up and she could hear him moving about downstairs, clattering dishes, whistling tunelessly along to some tune on the radio. She pulled on her dressing gown and made her way down the narrow stairs.

  Liam was in the process of setting the table in what they rather grandly referred to as the dining room. In truth, the house was little more than an extended two-up two-down, part of a network of terraced streets built at the turn of the nineteenth century for workers at the local mill. Some previous owner had knocked through the two downstairs reception rooms to create a more spacious living-cum-dining room, and they’d set up their Ikea dining table in the rear space, with a view over the tiny garden.

  ‘Breakfast,’ Liam said. ‘Full English. Well, bacon, egg and sausage. Upmarket sausage, though. None of your girly rubbish.’

  ‘Blimey,’ she said. ‘Beats my usual takeaway skinny latte.’

  ‘We can offer coffee, too, madam. Even a skinny latte, if you want it.’ She’d bought him a moderately upscale espresso machine for his last birthday, when she’d been feeling mildly flush after her promotion.

  ‘You’re spoiling me.’

  He paused, halfway into the kitchen, as if this thought hadn’t previously occurred to him. ‘Well, I haven’t had the chance recently. Thought we should make the most of it.’

  ‘Fine by me.’ She sat herself at the table in the manner of one about to embark on a fine-dining experience and watched him as he brought in the food and coffees. He was looking a little better, she thought, although it was always difficult to be sure. The last time she’d seen him, a month or so before, she’d thought he was having more difficulty with his mobility. Now, he was moving about in a more sprightly way, although she could tell that he was stabilizing himself against the furniture and doorframes with practised skill. He looked more cheerful, too, as if he were simply pleased to see her. As if, she added to herself, she wouldn’t be off again in another forty-eight hours.

  The breakfast was fine, even if, as Liam kept pointing out apologetically, the eggs were overdone and the bacon on the cold side. The best thing, though, was the atmosphere, the sense of relaxation and calm between them. This was like it used to be, she thought. When they first met, when they’d first started living together. When they’d been content just to be in each other’s company, not necessarily saying or doing anything much. She’d almost forgotten that it could be like this.

  Once they’d eaten, she showered and dressed, and then followed Liam through into what had originally been the house’s second bedroom, but which had long been adopted by Liam as his studio.

  ‘Couple of new ones,’ he said. ‘Did them while you were away.’

  She’d never doubted that Liam had real talent. She knew nothing much about art herself but she’d heard others, who knew what they were talking about, praising Liam’s work to the skies. At least one of his lecturers at art college had been convinced that Liam would be the next big thing, and had done his utmost to promote his work. But, so far at least, it just hadn’t happened. It wasn’t so surprising, he kept telling her. Talent – even if he really did have it, which Liam himself seemed to doubt – was only part of the equation. The rest was a mix of luck, confidence and a knack for unabashed self-promotion. None of those qualities, she was forced to concede, had been noticeably evident in Liam’s life to date.

  For her own part, while she had no idea of the commercial value of Liam’s work, she did think it was rather good. Once or twice, he tried to explain to her why he painted the way he did, who his influences were, but all that sailed immediately over her head. What she liked was the
semi-abstract quality, the sense that you could almost pin down what he was depicting, but then somehow it slipped away. You were left with a wonderful mélange of colours that always threatened to cohere into something recognizable before once again melting back into uncertainty.

  The new paintings were, as far as she could judge, at least the equal of anything he’d painted previously. She could see no sign that his talents were waning or – perhaps more pertinently – that the illness was having any adverse effect on his abilities. Though that didn’t necessarily mean very much. She had no idea how much effort it might have cost him to paint the new pictures, whether he was finding the task harder than before.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she said, gazing at the pictures. She had the sense that she ought to say something more profound. ‘Really beautiful,’ she added.

  ‘They’re OK,’ he conceded. ‘Not my best. But not bad. It’s not quite gone yet.’

  She had the sense that he was trying to provoke some response with the last comment, but was determined to resist the bait. ‘I won’t ask what they’re about,’ she said instead.

  He shrugged. ‘That one’s about eighty centimetres by sixty. The other’s a bit bigger.’

  ‘Ho, ho. Are they finished?’

  ‘More or less. Or at least I’ve got to the point where I should abandon them. I keep making minor tweaks, but I’ll probably end up ruining them.’

  ‘Leave them, then.’

  She looked up and peered out of the window at the patchwork of narrow gardens that stretched between the two rows of terraces. It was a perfect autumn day – a clear blue sky, no wind. One of those days when South London could look almost enticing.

  ‘Let’s go out,’ she suggested. ‘Up to the Common, maybe.’

  So they did. They drove Liam’s adapted Corsa – one of the few benefits of his illness had been that he’d qualified for the mobility allowance that paid the monthly rental – and parked up on the edge of Wimbledon Common. They spent the morning walking among the trees, enjoying the dappled sunlight, kicking the piles of newly fallen leaves. Like it used to be, she thought again. With no need to speak, no reason to bicker. No sense of doing anything much, except enjoying the moment, sharing the day. Enjoying each other.