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There seemed to be no other option. I was powerless to resist her. She lead me into temptation and I followed impetuously. The sex was hot and hard. Our hunger for each other insatiable. Up against the wall as soon as we got through her front door. Eager hands fighting to undress each other. Eager hands fighting to feel each other. Eager mouths desperate to taste each other. On her kitchen floor, tiles cold against my back, her hot against my skin. On her kitchen table, feasting on her body. It was madness but I wanted nothing else. Eventually finished, I lay in her arms on the big grey sofa, her body sultry against my own and it felt like magic. Like there was nobody else in the world and all that existed was us and this moment.
But I had to go. Again. There was work. There was real life to return to. Already I had been gone too long. Already there would be more questions to answer and more lies I would readily tell. I’d changed so much I didn’t recognise myself. I had a quick shower in her beautiful bathroom and rushed back to the office, my post sex hair giving me away I was sure. Real life felt surreal. I could still taste her on my tongue.
Detective Chief Inspector Travis’s booming voice as I ran in disheveled, “DS Towers. Jen. Where the fuck have you been?”
7
I made up a story about thinking I saw something suspicious at the back of the carwash, so I stayed to watch, only it turned out to be nothing. My phone must have been out of signal when I got the 7 missed calls. The lies spilled from my lips so easily. And everyone believed me. All my years of honesty and hard work had given me a solid platform from which to lie from.
My lies carried on. Somewhere, subconsciously, I had made a decision to condone infidelity. My own infidelity.
I wanted Lyra and I didn’t care what I had to do or say to buy time with her. I lied at work. I lied at home. I took a sick day and spent it in bed with her. The rain lashed down outside her big windows and I felt cosy and warm in her bed. We had sex, she made cheese on toast in her underwear and a tight vest top and I watched her as she cooked. We ate it from a blanket nest on her big sofa. We watched Netflix, we had more sex. We Netflixed and chilled in every possible meaning of the phrase. I took an annual leave day when the sun shone and we went to the forest with a picnic and walked around a beautiful lake. We found a secluded area in the trees, laid our coats down and made out on the forest floor like lusty teenagers. Pine needles in my hair. Her fingers in my hair. I felt so alive.
Home life was the same as ever. As Simon said, we had an abiding love. A healthy marriage going through its own ups and downs. I often wondered if he suspected I was seeing someone else and dismissed it as a fling. Some expected part of a marriage that was just to be buried and ignored. As if it wouldn’t threaten the sanctity of marriage. As if it wouldn’t threaten the sanctity of us. When I was a child we played a dumb game called ‘Simon Says’. Where you basically are expected to do anything that Simon says in order to win the game. That a man called Simon is always right. I always wondered where it came from. I made vows to Simon when we married. But I never believed that everything that Simon said was right.
Lyra travelled extensively for work. A couple of days in Istanbul, a week in South America. When she was away she would text me plenty. We would sneak phone calls when we could. When she was home, we saw each other whenever possible. We stole moments when we could. Stolen hours from my home life. Stolen hours from my work life. She became my obsession and I was hers. I learned to live off very little sleep.
She invited me to Amsterdam with her. I told Simon I was visiting an old school friend. She went to business meetings while I had a lazy morning then met her for lunch near our tall canal side hotel. We hired bikes and cycled round the city. We went to the sex museum and laughed all the way through its quirky exhibits. We went on a canal trip in the evenin
g, she looked so beautiful in the moonlight reflecting off the water. We drank expensive beers and walked along the red light district hand in hand. I was fascinated to see the sex workers in their shop windows, red glows lighting up their bodies, groups of drunk men leering at them. I held Lyra’s hand as we walked. I held her in my arms after sex. I started falling in love with her in the easy Amsterdam air. There seemed to be so much possibility. We were so happy. We flew home and normal life resumed.
The next couple of months passed in a haze and actually everything became almost easy. It seemed so totally possible to balance both my lives. That there didn’t need to be any divorcing of Simon or coming out to my friends and family. I barely saw my family anymore. We were never overly close and now I seemed to have a million ready excuses. Most of my social life was with my police colleagues and again, I had so many excuses for them. Lyra was the most intense relationship I had ever had. The chemical lure of her was so much I could feel the desire between us even when she was halfway around the world. She never asked me about Simon or asked me for more. I had this romantic idea that one day we would just run away from everything together, there would be no more work and no more marriage. That there would just be us. Maybe in a country cottage or a little house by the sea. We would get a dog and just live happily ever after. More madness from me. She never mentioned the future. I didn’t ask.
Work was still a frustrating game of waiting and hoping. It would feel like we were closing in and then feel like we were a million miles away. Lorenzo was toying with us. He was the cat and we were the mice. It worried me that we might still have a mole within our ranks but I was no closer to identifying our mole. Surveillance on Lorenzo bored me, so I tried to avoid getting stuck with it- the beauty of being a Sergeant meaning I had constables beneath me to assign instead. I took my Inspector exams earlier in the year. I thought for a while that rising through the ranks was something that was really important to me. I passed as far as the scoring went, but too many of us passed our Inspector exams and I wasn’t awarded a position. Men I considered less than me were. It made me angry against the system. I had become that cliche of the angry feminist. Bitter about being passed over for promotion. I could always reapply on the next intake. But the job was starting to wear away at me. As if it didn’t fit properly anymore. I had become so institutionalised spending my whole adult life as a police officer that it was hard to imagine anything else. I got into the job in the first place because I wanted to make a real difference and help people. But, there I was, swimming in treacle with my hands tied.
I headed into work the next morning to the welcome news that there had been a breakthrough and the overnight surveillance officers had identified a new contact of Lorenzo. Someone they were convinced was transporting the drugs and storing them. DCI Travis pointed at the incident board which had been updated with a photo of the suspect. She was unmistakable, her blue eyes blazing from the board. It was Lyra. I felt sick in the very pit of my stomach. I felt dizzy. I staggered to the toilets and vomited bile. Retching and tasting blood in the back of my throat. I rinsed my mouth out, my face as pale as a ghost.
Lyra.
Liar.
8
I wandered, dazed and confused back into the incident room, Lyra’s face haunting me from the incident board.
“Jen, you look like you have seen a ghost. Are you ok? You should go home?” DC Alice Jackson’s voice.
“I’m OK, sorry. Carry on. Who is this new female contact?” I managed to choke out some words.
DCI Phil Travis looked at me quizzically from the front of the room. That look of bewilderment a man often has when a woman does something they just don’t understand. “DS Towers. Nice of you to rejoin us. Shall I continue my briefing?”
I nodded and he continued.
He held in his left hand a drum stick of unknown origin. He thrust it towards Lyra’s photo and tapped squarely on her face.
“This is Sarah Jones. 27 years old. She is a girlfriend of Daniel Lorenzo. I’m not sure where he picked her up or how long she has been sleeping with him and working for him but his company owns her penthouse apartment in the Loxley building. She is travelling extensively, potentially on different passports and we believe she is bringing huge quantities of Class A substances into the country with her on every trip and storing them for him. Jackson, Reid, I want you two investigating her trips abroad and what she does while she is there. Denman, see what you can dig up on her past. Scott, look into her life now, online presence, friends, family, what she does with her days.”
“Towers,” he focussed on me. “Go home, you look like shit. Get some sleep and come in fresh tomorrow.”
I fell out of the police station into the grey wintery daylight feeling sicker than I ever had. I drove straight to the Loxley building. Elevator to the top floor. Turned left. Walked to the end of the corridor. Flat 44. Knocked on the door.
She opened the door in a turquoise silk kimono. Her eyes the colour of the silk. Her beautiful face surprised at the unscheduled visit.
“Sarah Jones?” I spat the name out. “You lied to me. About everything. Everything I thought was real.”
She pulled me inside and pushed the door shut. I sat on her sofa and cried. I was hurt. I was angry. I didn’t really know where to start. So she did. She held my hand in hers as she talked honestly and openly for the first time.
She grew up in foster homes from the age of 4. She was 13 years old when she first met Daniel Lorenzo and he was charming and kind to her and he offered her a way out. He offered her an escape. An escape from her life as it was. Little did she know she would still be kept in a cage by him. She would become his beautiful bird in a gilded cage. A gilded cage that still had bars.
