The Past and Other Lies Read Online Free PDF

knew—they both knew—that neither of them was going to say anything.
    ‘Al right . I’m coming!’ Jennifer called back, her voice unnaturally high, quavering. She did not take her eyes off Charlotte. Downstairs the theme from Crossroads reached a climax then abruptly fell silent.
    Jennifer eased herself up onto her elbows then, painfully, to her knees. Charlotte hadn’t moved. She lay on her back, her—or possibly Jennifer’s—grey-and-red striped tie, torn and askew around her neck, so that she looked like a punk rocker. She was no longer looking at Jennifer but was staring up at the ceiling and Jennifer wanted to demand to know what she was thinking. Then she remembered all over again why this had happened and she said nothing.
    Instead she reached down and began, this time with careful snips, to cut the tie from around Charlotte’s neck. The loss of two school ties was going to take some explaining, she realised grimly.
    When she had finished Jennifer got to her feet. Then she dropped straight onto her bed as it became clear her legs were not going to hold her weight. So she sat on the edge of the bed and clasped her knees and discovered she was going to be sick.
    At the same time, she saw that the two butchered school ties were the least of their worries, for around Charlotte’s throat was a vivid red mark that looked exactly as though she had just tried to hang herself.
    Jennifer wondered if she was going to make it to the bathroom before she was sick.

CHAPTER FOUR
    O N THAT SAME Wednesday morning, as Charlotte was sliding her Fiesta into the library car park on Waverley University’s main campus, Jennifer Denzel stood in the middle of the toy department on the fifth floor of Gossup and Batch’s department store in London’s West End pondering the problem of Barbie versus Action Man.
    She had the same problem at this time every year: Christmas was over, the Grotto that had consumed almost a quarter of the toy department’s precious floor space had finally been dismantled, the Santa Claus costumes had been dry-cleaned and stored away, and all of Santa’s helpers had rejoined the dole queue or moved back to Vancouver or Dublin or Perth or wherever it was they had come from. The January sales had come and gone, and now she was stuck with the usual decision about which was to fill the gap: Barbie or Action Man?
    Located in a six-storey early-Victorian mansion just off Regent Street, Gossup and Batch was one of London’s oldest still-operational department stores, and even in the new millennium it still clung valiantly to an aura of late-Victorian gentility. The words Emporium of Elegance still adorned the main entrance in ornate italics and were picked out in silver letters on the store’s famous burgundy shopping bags, and doormen in gold-braided livery still tipped their top hats as you entered and departed.
    Unfortunately, it appeared the modern shopper no longer cared to traipse through dozens of departments and past hundreds of elegantly presented products in order to find a single item. They preferred to nip into a boutique in their lunch hour. They liked to park on a rooftop and take a lift down to a covered shopping mall. They chose discounts and wholesale prices over quality and excellent service.
    An unspectacular stock market float in the late nineties had done little to halt the store’s decline, and with shares dipping to just eight-seven pence the latest general manager had just been quietly and expensively dispatched.
    As well as plummeting standards and a teetering share price, employee turnover was high and the title of the unofficial staff newsletter, Gossip and Bitch , gave some indication why. Jennifer was one of the very few exceptions in this perilous climate, having survived nine years at Gossup and Batch, and was now, thanks largely to an ability to keep her head down, manager of the toy department.
    Peacekeeper™, she observed, wasn’t selling well.
    She frowned at the multitude