Page 32 of Lie For Me

Jack shrugged.

‘It’s growing on me.’

There was a pause, then Lucy burst out laughing.

‘Oh no, that’s an awful dad joke!’

They heard footsteps, then voices grew louder as people approached. They fell quiet and Lucy gripped Jack’s arm.

‘Shhh!’ she hissed in Jack’s ear.

The footsteps drew closer, just the other side of the wall, then paused, and the voices became hushed. Lucy, trying not to laugh, snorted into Jack’s shoulder. After a moment, the footsteps picked up again, and the voices faded away.

Jack prised Lucy’s fingers off his arm.

‘I think they saw us but were too embarrassed to say anything,’ he said. ‘I mean, how do you approach a couple of pairs of feet and ask about what’s going on?’

‘We might be in trouble down here,’ Lucy protested. ‘We might have fallen and can’t get up. There might have been a moider.’

Lucy said murder in her best New York cop accent.

Eyes wide, she gripped Jack’s arm again.

‘And they just walked past the bodies. We might be decomposing down here. Vital evidence is being lost. The killer is getting away, and they just want to get back to the canapes!’ She wagged her finger. ‘They’ll rue the day, mark my––’

‘Stop killing us off!’ Jack said, elbowing her and laughing at the leaps her imagination took. ‘I think they heard you snorting. I don’t think there’s any doubt we’re alive.’

‘Tsk, but for how long?’ Lucy grumbled. ‘You might have it in for me.’

‘I might,’ Jack agreed.

‘And the police will ask if anyone saw anything suspicious, and they won’t be able to give a full account, because all they saw were feet.’

‘And shoes.’

‘Yes, feet and shoes. And they’ll be on the news saying, If only we had stopped and looked at what was going on.' Lucy pressed her hand to her chest. ‘That poor, beautiful, gifted girl wouldn’t be lost the world.’

Lucy sniffed.

‘Wow,’ Jack said, smothering a laugh. ‘But so long as I make a clean getaway, I think I’m okay with that.’

‘With the world losing me and all my gifts?’

‘I think the world will keep spinning. At a thousand miles an hour. With or without you.’

‘Wow,’ Lucy said, ‘Good to know you’d miss me.’

‘You just created a scenario in which I was the person who murdered you, but now I am supposed to miss you, too?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘You’re conflicted. I drove you to do it—’

‘That’s easy to imagine.’

‘––but later, you are wracked with guilt. You keep a picture of me in your wallet and look at it every day for years, shedding a tear.’ Lucy rolled over slightly and stared at him. ‘You can’t sleep because there’s an enormous hole in your life.’ She elbowed him. ‘That’s me, by the way. The huge gaping hole in your life is because you miss me.’

‘I think I’d be too busy evading capture and trying to live off-grid to miss you,’ he said.

‘Your one moment of madness has robbed the world of all this,’ Lucy swept her arm over herself. ‘But no one,’ she intoned in a deep voice, ‘will suffer more than you.’

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