Between the Lies
Elaine Bishop
There is a much safer and easier route back to the seafront from here, past the caravan park
and the Sailor’s Arms and out on to the main road. But Adrienne turns right out of the
telephone kiosk and heads back the way she came, through the trees towards the east cliffs,
where is less chance of being seen.
Although she’s safe enough. Apart from a few seagulls picking at the sand, she is
completely, utterly alone out here. There are no boats on the water, no lights. It’s too cold on
the beach for the dog walkers, and for the teenagers who hang out by the rocks in the
evenings to drink cheap cider and smoke. It is too cold now for the fishermen that she has
seen every night this week dotted along the shoreline under canvas igloos. It’s unlikely that
anyone would recognise her anyway. She would barely know herself – in this ridiculous
man’s extra large sheepskin, her jeans tucked into knee-length socks, her socks stuffed into
training shoes with fluorescent stripes that flash when she moves. She must look like one of
the winos she used to see up at the camp-site late at night, ducking into the empty tents.
The loose sleeves of her fisherman’s sweater hang over her fingerless gloves and her scarf
has been blown off her head. Her hair is knotted and stiff with brine.
It is snowing again, and she is anxious to get back to the house. But out on the
footpath, the full force of the salty air hits her and she stops – two feet from the cliff edge –
and gathers the fur collar of her coat around her neck. It is almost dark, the horizon gone.
There are snow clouds above, and snow clouds mirrored in the salt pools more than two
hundred feet below. The sea is dark and choppy, washing in fast over the mudbanks. She
can see a confused line of geese, jumpy and agitated, along the incoming edge of the surf. A
familiar row of beach huts trim the sand, their soft pastels more incongruous than ever in this
barren and restless place. In this moment , looking out at the sky, the water, the sand, the
memories are as sharp and painful as this vicious north easterly wind. Adrienne lived up on
this coast for four long years when she was younger, and she often hid in those huts when
she was in trouble back at her uncle’s house, or if she didn’t want to go to school. A marsh
harrier swoops down over her, and as she turns to watch to lift into the breeze, she half
expects to see herself – her teenage self – stomping across the dunes with her boots in her
hand, her school trousers rolled to her knees.
‘You haven’t come very far have you?’
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She shouts this out loud, but it doesn’t sound like her voice. It has a controlled, spiteful
edge, and it seems as if it is coming from somewhere else. She looks behind her, where
there is nothing but gorse, and feels a shiver of dread and emptiness.
On the steps down to the beach, the wind is behind her, like a flat hand at her back shoving
her forward. She has to dig her heels into the snow and ice to stay on her feet. She can’t
remember it ever being this cold. This afternoon, when she put her crusts out on the patio
wall, the small thermometer beside the back door read minus eight. It must be minus 14
now, with the wind chill. Shortly before the electricity went off this afternoon, she heard on
the radio that the water in Blakeney harbour had frozen overnight, the yachts and dinghies
jammed in their moorings. Some of the villages inland have been cut off for days by drifts
more than ten foot high. The snow is so deep in parts that farmers have been unable to
reach livestock, and many animals are believed to have perished. A few miles along the
coast at Bacton, birds have washed up on the beach encased in ice.
She doesn’t want to think about that. It’s almost too cold to think. As she drops down
the last few steps to the sand, she forces herself instead to make a mental list of things that
will sustain her through the long night ahead. She has two cigarettes left, and a bottle of red
wine she found in the cellar back at the house she’s been staying in, when she was looking
for something warm to wear. Yesterday she discovered an unopened packet of sugared
almonds on the top of one of the kitchen cupboards, that the cleaning lady must have
missed. Hopefully, the power will come back on in the next hour or two, but if it doesn’t there
are candles in the kitchen drawer and a lighter, that awful stainless steel Zippo with the
naked woman hand etched on the front. There should be enough slack on the floor of the
coalhouse to get a fire going. It will something useful to do with those newspapers.
The snow is coming down hard now, falling steadily in the swirling wind. She can
barely see more than three or four feet ahead. She walks into something – a tow rope strung
a foot above the sand – and pitches forward, face first into the ice and sand. She lays there
for a few moments, shaken. She feels a childish urge to cry, but she wants to laugh. This
state she’s in – this mess she has made for herself – it’s laughable. She gets to her feet and
brushes the snow off her face. The wind drops, and in that split second she sees, at last, the
long thin spines of the first breakwater, and beyond them, the masts of the sloops and
dinghies lined up along the black curve of the sea wall.
And footprints. Two sets of men’s footprints, in the fresh snow on the steps leading up
to the Esplanade and the front of the house. The gate is open, and one side of the potted
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laurel has been brushed clean. Quickly, a shadow moves across the sitting room window.
She hears a man’s voice and boots, stamping the mat, kicking off snow. The doorbell rings in
three sharp insistent bursts. She ducks behind the nearest tractor, a cold rush of air beneath
her heart.
They have found her.
‘There’s no-one in. It’s pitch black inside.’
‘All the houses are, look. There must be a power cut here too. Try again.’
There are two men under the front porch huddled close to the door. They ring the bell
again, then knock hard on the stained glass until it shakes. One of them – a big, tall, heavy
man – crouches down, opens the letterbox and peers inside.
‘Adrienne?’ he yells. ‘Are you in there?’
‘Adrienne. It’s Paul Tanner here, from the Mirror. Just hear me out for a sec. We’re
here to try to help you. Don’t you want people to hear your side of things? I reckon you must
be ready to stand up for yourself by now.’
The other man, who has a plaid jacket and a ponytail, moves across the front of the
house and takes a camera out of the bag that hangs over his shoulder. He puts it against the
window and holds his finger down on the shutter. Three bright sharp flashes reflect off the
glass.
‘D’you get anything?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Fuck, it’s cold. Why don’t you go down the alley and watch the back ‘til Kate gets
here?’
‘You sure this is the right place?’
‘Four-storey Georgian mid-terrace. Turquoise railings and a balcony. Wooden bench
out front. Yes, I’m sure. The woman who called it in used to live up here.’
Somewhere, a car engine revs, and she hears tyres spinning in the snow. Headlamps,
two steady hoops of light, crawl past the amusement arcade, and a car comes into view, the
silhouettes of two people visible behind the misted windscreen.
‘Shit, look who’s here. Who the hell tipped them off?’
The man at the window says something else. But the waves are too close and the
disturbed seagulls are wheeling and screaming above her head and Adrienne can’t make out
one word. She puts her hand to the red dice that hang at her throat. It’s hard to breathe
steadily, to take in enough air.
‘The woman who called it in used to live here.’
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A powerful gust of wind comes up, and she feels something shift inside her. The sea
wall and the breakwater seem to collapse and flatten out around her, and for a long, cold
moment there is nothing – no sea, no boats, no sand – just this blinding riotous sky, and the
wind carrying its weight of snow. And the knowledge that the one person in the world she
needed to trust has betrayed her.
Ten days earlier
MYSTERY surrounds the relationship between top Tory MP Sir David Jefferson and a
beautiful young Italian.
The junior Home Office minister has refused to comment on claims that he has been
making clandestine late-night visits to the home of stunning 35-year-old gardener Adrienne
Bernis.
Jefferson – known in Parliamentary circles as Thatcher’s ‘golden boy’ and widely tipped
to play a key role in this year’s General Election campaign – was seen at 2.30am on Friday,
leaving the two-bedroom end of terrace house Waltham Abbey, in the heart of his Epping
Forest constituency. The picture above clearly shows the MP outside her back door, in
dark-coloured trousers, black bomber jacket, and black knitted hat.
Neighbour Greg Michaels couldn’t believe his eyes when he first spotted the married
father-of-three last month.
‘I was putting my dad’s bin out,’ he told the Mirror. ‘He came out of the door, had a
good look around, then sneaked out of the back gate and ran along the edge of the golf club
to Henry Street, where he got into a black D-reg Saab. Yes it was dark, but I knew straight
away it was him. He gave a talk a few weeks back at my son’s school.’
The allegations, coming only three months after Jeffery Archer’s resignation over the
Monica Coughlan scandal, are set to rock the Tory party – and shock Parliamentary
colleagues. In 1983, Jefferson was the first Conservative MP to publicly call for Cecil
Parkinson’s resignation in the wake of the Sara Keays affair, in spite of overwhelming
Parliamentary and public support for the Trade and Industry secretary.
He said at the time: ‘There are many who believe this was a private mistake that ought
not cost a man his political career. But I very strongly believe that allowing him to continue in
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office would be at much greater cost to the Conservative party, a party whose leader has so
recently proclaimed the virtue of Victorian values and personal responsibility.’
Jefferson has been an extremely popular MP since the 1987 General Election when he
held the Epping Forest seat previously occupied by retiring Tory MP Jacob Holmes. In a
recent BBC interview, Holmes described his successor as a perfect future candidate for the
Tory leadership. ‘He is an extremely intelligent, charismatic and likeable self-made politician,’
he said. ‘He is almost too good to be true.’
Reporters tried to contact the MP last night at his home, a former hunting lodge on the
edge of Epping Forest. His black Saab was in the drive alongside wife Melanie’s Toyota
MR2, but the curtains were drawn and no-one was answering the door or telephone. Ms
Bernis left her home around 10pm, refusing to comment on the allegations.
Full story and pictures, pages 4 and 5
The photographer must have hidden behind a wall or a bush in her back garden and
pounced as soon as she opened the door. He might have called her name as he stepped out
in front of her – warmly, as if he was a friend – his camera primed, his finger ready on the
shutter button. Maybe it was the startling white pop of his flash gun that alerted her. In the
newspaper picture, the woman appeared to recoil as the shutter went, her head tilted
backwards, her mouth open in surprise. The expression in her dark startled eyes somehow
managed to convey both wariness and calm, as if in that moment she had understood
exactly what she had coming to her in the days and weeks ahead.
The photograph was a three-column by ten-inch black and white portrait shot, under
the strap line David Jefferson’s lover? It had been taken in the dark, the blurred halo of a
garden light in the top left corner. She had one hand, with her keys still in it, on the door
frame. The other was at her throat, her fingers curled around what appeared to be two
playing dice strung on black string or a shoelace around her neck. She was wearing a lightcoloured parka, open at the front, with a fur-lined hood across one shoulder. Dark, wavy
curls fell across her forehead, the rest of her hair was held back by an old-fashioned polka
dot scarf folded into a triangle and knotted behind her head.
The Mirror’s front page lead had described her as beautiful, stunning. I didn’t think she
was beautiful at first. She had a long nose and high, prominent cheekbones. A large mouth,
with full lips, and a gap between her two front teeth. Yet there was something striking in
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those irregular features. It was as if those individual accidents of nature that would spoil an
otherwise perfect countenance, had somehow come together in her to create an
extraordinary natural beauty.
I had recognised her. In that first split second, when I turned to page five and saw the
photograph, I had known her. And then suddenly I hadn’t. The conviction that I had met this
woman before – that I had seen her, spoken to her, touched her – had come and gone in an
instant. I was alone in the news room that night, working through the dreaded Saturday late
shift. All the other reporters and subs had left by seven, and most of the lights were off. I
took the Sunday Mirror over to the back of the room and studied the picture in the light of the
single fluorescent strip above my desk, willing myself to remember. The article said she was
35, ten years older than me. A teacher maybe, or one of the parents from my old school?
Someone I had interviewed for a story, years ago, on the weekly paper I trained on up at the
coast? Remembering who she was and how I knew her seemed ridiculously important. I
picked up a biro and drew a circle around her face. I stared hard at her, until she became
nothing but a random arrangement of dots, a fuzzy shape on a background of shadows. Like
one of those photographs that our readers used to send into the paper every now and then to
try to prove that ghosts exist...
© Elaine Bishop
‘Between the Lies’ is the story of two women, brought together by a political sex scandal.
Adrienne Bernis is the lonely Italian gardener who has been sleeping with an ambitious and
powerful Tory cabinet minister. When regional newspaper reporter Olivia Osborn discovers
a local angle to the story, she sees it as a way of realising her own national tabloid ambitions.
But as she strives to put together the pieces of Adrienne’s difficult and complex past, she is
forced to confront the shocking truth about her own identity, and the lies and secrets that
hold her family together.
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