The Liar's Daughter Read online

  THE LIAR’S DAUGHTER

  Claire Allan

  Copyright

  Published by AVON

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

  Copyright © Claire Allan 2020

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

  Cover photograph © Rekha Garton / Arcangel Images

  Claire Allan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008378356

  Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008321956

  Version: 2019-12-13

  Dedication

  To my children,

  who make me want to be the best person

  I can be every single day.

  I love you both so much.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Now

  Chapter One: Heidi

  Chapter Two: Heidi

  Chapter Three: Heidi

  Chapter Four: Ciara

  Chapter Five: Ciara

  Chapter Six: Ciara

  Chapter Seven: Joe

  Chapter Eight: Heidi

  Chapter Nine: Heidi

  Chapter Ten: Ciara

  Chapter Eleven: Heidi

  Chapter Twelve: Heidi

  Chapter Thirteen: Heidi

  Chapter Fourteen: Joe

  Chapter Fifteen: Ciara

  Chapter Sixteen: Heidi

  Chapter Seventeen: Heidi

  Chapter Eighteen: Joe

  Chapter Nineteen: Heidi

  Chapter Twenty: Heidi

  Chapter Twenty-One: Ciara

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Heidi

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Heidi

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Heidi

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Heidi

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Heidi

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Heidi

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Heidi

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Ciara

  Chapter Thirty: Heidi

  Chapter Thirty-One: Heidi

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Heidi

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Heidi

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Heidi

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Ciara

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Heidi

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Ciara

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Heidi

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Heidi

  Chapter Forty: Heidi

  Chapter Forty-One: Heidi

  Chapter Forty-Two: Heidi

  Chapter Forty-Three: Ciara

  Chapter Forty-Four: Heidi

  Chapter Forty-Five: Heidi

  Chapter Forty-Six: Heidi

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Ciara

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Heidi

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Heidi

  Chapter Fifty: Heidi

  Chapter Fifty-One: Heidi

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Ciara

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Ciara

  Chapter Fifty-Four: Ciara

  Chapter Fifty-Five: Ciara

  Chapter Fifty-Six: Ciara

  Chapter Fifty-Seven: Heidi

  Chapter Fifty-Eight: Ciara

  Chapter Fifty-Nine: Heidi

  Chapter Sixty: Heidi

  Chapter Sixty-One: Ciara

  Chapter Sixty-Two: Heidi

  Chapter Sixty-Three: Ciara

  Chapter Sixty-Four: Heidi

  Chapter Sixty-Five: Alex

  Chapter Sixty-Six: Ciara

  Chapter Sixty-Seven: Heidi

  Chapter Sixty-Eight: Ciara

  Chapter Sixty-Nine: Ciara

  Chapter Seventy: Heidi

  Chapter Seventy-One: Ciara

  Chapter Seventy-Two: Heidi

  Chapter Seventy-Three: Heidi

  Epilogue: Kathleen

  Keep Reading …

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Claire Allan

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Now

  Joe

  They’ve told me I’m dying. A doctor in a white coat, and a blue shirt with a stripy navy tie that had a coffee stain on it, had perched on the end of my bed and adopted a very serious expression on his face.

  A nurse – who I had heard give out to her colleagues about the lack of resources on the ward and how she was getting ‘sick, sore and tired of working her arse off’ for too much responsibility and not enough money – had pulled the clinical blue curtain around my bed to afford me some privacy.

  Her sombre expression mirrored that of the doctor, although it was clear it was a front. It was almost the end of her shift. This was a life-changing moment for me – the moment I heard I was condemned to die despite all the chemotherapy and surgery that they had been able to offer. For Katrina the nurse, with her short brown hair and ice-blue eyes, it was just the end of another shift. And she was tired. She had to do this final grim task before she clocked out and went home. She’d get a cup of tea, or coffee, or maybe a glass of wine (she seemed the type). She’d kick off her shoes and watch something mindless on the TV. She might even laugh if it was funny.

  I doubted she’d think about me and the fact that I was dying. That no more could be done for me. I was already in the past tense for Katrina.

  I was feeling sorry for myself, but that was allowed, wasn’t it?

  I wasn’t that old. This shouldn’t have been happening yet.

  I didn’t deserve this.

  I wanted to scream that I didn’t deserve this.

  But it was like there was a tiny voice, or a chorus of voices, whispering in her ear that this is exactly what I did deserve. In fact, I deserved much, much worse.

  Chapter One

  Heidi

  Now

  The back seat of my car is full to bursting. Lily is bundled up in her car seat, asleep and blissfully ignorant of the strained atmosphere between her fellow passengers. A weekend bag, filled with pyjamas and underpants to be laundered, a toilet bag containing a razor, toothbrush, soap and shaving foam sits beside her.

  A plastic ‘Patient’s Property’ bag sits in the footwell. It’s loaded with boxes of medication, dressings, instructions that I will have to will my postpartum brain into reading and understanding once we are back at Joe’s house.

  I won’t call it home. It ceased to be my home the moment my mother died – also from cancer. Unlike Joe McKee, the man who has played the role of my father for the past twenty-one years, she didn’t deserve it.

  ‘Did you lift my slippers?’ Joe asks as I help him ease his seat belt on. He is still sore – still tender from the operation to try to remove the tumour found in his lung. Except that they found it had company, all through his body. ‘Riddled with it,’ he said, sadl
y, when he told me.

  ‘Yes, I lifted your slippers. They’re in your bag, along with your pyjamas and dressing gown.’

  ‘There was a book in the locker. Did you …’

  ‘Yes, I lifted it as well. And packed it. Along with your prayer book and your reading glasses.’

  He nods. ‘I wonder how many more books I’ll read,’ he says, to himself as much as anything.

  ‘You know what the doctor said,’ I tell him. ‘Take it one day at a time.’

  ‘Those days are still numbered, though, aren’t they? I doubt I’ll see the spring.’

  He looks out onto the bleak, grey car park of Altnagelvin hospital, on the very outskirts of Derry, Belfast in one direction and the city centre in the other. The sky is almost as dark as the tarmac below us. Heavy and angry-looking. It seems apt.

  Joe has always liked spring. More so as he grew older and found comfort in God. ‘A time of renewal,’ he would say as the evenings stretched and the temperatures crept up.

  I know as well as he does, there’ll be no renewal for him this year.

  ‘You never know,’ I say, even though we do know. Odds are he’ll be gone before the seasons change.

  He shakes his head slowly, looks ahead. ‘Some things you feel, Heidi.’

  I switch on the engine, nudge the car into first gear.

  ‘It’s not a lot of time, is it?’ he asks. ‘To do all the things I need to do or to make things right.’

  Joe McKee could have a whole other lifetime to live and it wouldn’t be long enough for him to make things right. There’s a time in a person’s life, if they are truly, truly wicked, when they move beyond the point of redemption.

  I stay quiet. If he’s looking for some sort of absolution, he’s looking in the wrong place.

  Ten minutes of a silent drive home later, we pull up outside his house. The house my mother owned, which in turn will belong to me when he is gone. This is where the first almost ten years of my life were blissfully happy. My mother created a loving, warm and magical childhood for me.

  Then she died.

  Even all these years later, there are times when that realisation hits me like a punch to the gut.

  The world has never seemed fair or right since.

  ‘Will we get you inside?’ I ask Joe.

  He nods. ‘I’m tired.’

  He looks pale, his eyes red, dark circles around them. The effort of the short journey has worn him out. He looks wretched. It’s almost, but not quite, enough to make me feel sorry for him.

  ‘Sure, we’ll get you in and to bed then,’ I say. ‘Just let me take Lily in first. I don’t want to leave her here in the car on her own.’

  He nods. ‘Of course not.’

  I open the door, carry Lily, who is thankfully still sleeping, through to the living room in her car seat and allow myself a few seconds to take some deep breaths. I’m shaking, I realise, but it’s not from the cold. I count my breaths in and out until the shaking lessens. I tuck Lily’s blanket around her, stroke her cheek. Note how she is filling out, changing. Only five months old and already I can see shades of the little girl she will become.

  I do not like being here with Joe. Even in his frail condition, I still feel scared to be close to him.

  I’ve tried to have as little as possible to do with him, especially after I moved away to university at eighteen. But somehow, and much to my shame and self-hatred, I still find myself unable to cut him from my life entirely.

  It will be nigh on impossible now, not without appearing to be cold and uncaring. Not without telling people all the things that happened. The things I’ve tried so hard to bury.

  The thought of how much he will rely on me over the coming months make me feel sick to my stomach.

  ‘It must be nice in a way,’ the nurse at the hospital had said, ‘to care for him now. After all he did for you after your mother died. There aren’t many men who would take on the responsibility of someone else’s child like that.’

  Joe had told her he had only done what any decent person would do.

  But Joe McKee doesn’t have a decent bone in his cancer-riddled body.

  The sweat is lashing off me by the time I have helped Joe upstairs and into bed. I do not like the feel of him leaning his weight on me as I help him up the stairs. I do not like helping him slip off his shoes and socks and lift his feet into bed. He is complaining of the cold, even though the heating is on full and the extra oil-filled radiator in his room is pumping out a dusty, dry heat.

  I pull an extra blanket from the airing cupboard and put it over him, offer to make a cup of tea. ‘It might bring you round a bit,’ I say. I feel I’m speaking the words from a script of what a good daughter should say to an ailing parent.

  ‘It might, aye,’ he replies. ‘That would be nice, Heidi.’

  He makes a move as if he is going to pat my hand and I pull it away quickly. The gesture makes him flinch, but I won’t have any physical contact with him that isn’t strictly necessary.

  I catch him looking at me, his face sorrowful. I wonder if he’ll say it, now. The words he’s never said in all these years. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Maybe …’ he starts. ‘When I’ve had a rest, maybe you could call Ciara for me? She should know how ill I am. Or maybe you’ve spoken to her already?’

  Ciara. Joe’s daughter. His real daughter. The one tied to him by biology. The one he left behind when he moved in with Mum and me all those years ago. She has never forgiven him. Or me, for that matter. We don’t speak. I can’t remember the last time I saw her face-to-face.

  ‘I’ve not spoken to her yet,’ I tell him. I understand why he thinks it would be easier for her to hear from me first, so I know I’ll have to do it. Regardless of the state of her relationship with her father, she has a right to know he is dying. ‘But I will. When you wake up. You look exhausted.’

  ‘That’s what dying will do to you,’ he says with a sad smile.

  I don’t return it, I just nod and leave the room, head for the kitchen, where I disseminate his various medicines into boxes and baskets for easy access while waiting for his tea to brew.

  I’ve long since given up any idea of religion, but while I’m waiting for the kettle to hiss and rattle, I wish there was a godlike figure I could pray to for the strength to get through the next few weeks without wanting to throw myself off a bridge or put a pillow over his face.

  Chapter Two

  Heidi

  Then

  I first met Joe when I was seven years old. He was already sitting at the table in Fiorentinis Ice Cream Parlour on the Strand Road, looking around him at the old photos and pictures on the wall, when my mother and I arrived.

  ‘I’ve someone I’d like you to meet,’ my mother had said.

  I remember that she looked happy. That her eyes seemed to sparkle. She’d put on make-up and I could smell she was wearing her favourite perfume – the kind she saved for special occasions. She’d even let me have a little spritz on my wrists. I remember that I was happy for her. Her excitement was contagious and yes, I was a little nervous, too. But that was okay, my mother had told me. It’s okay to feel nervous about meeting new people.

  I liked the cocooned world my mother and I shared. Just the two of us, with Granny and Grandad popping in occasionally to check on us. To fuss. To ask if we had everything we needed. My mother’s response was always the same. ‘Sure we have each other and that’s all that we need,’ she’d smile.

  My grandmother’s eyes would tighten so that I could see the fine lines of wrinkles spread out across her face. ‘You know I worry,’ she would say.

  ‘There’s no need to,’ my mother would reply.

  And there wasn’t. We were happy. We had what we needed. A small house with a garden big enough to play in. Food in the cupboards. And if I needed new shoes or a new school coat, or sometimes just because Mum thought we deserved a treat, she would reach into the tin tea caddy on the top shelf of the corner cupboard in the kitchen, lif
t out some money and treat us.

  Occasionally, the topic of my father would come up. Usually around Father’s Day, or after we’d watched some schmaltzy family movie. My mother would tell me, as gently as she could, that my father had moved away before I’d been born. ‘He wasn’t ready to be a daddy just yet,’ she’d say, and sometimes there would be a sadness in her eyes about it. ‘But that was everything to do with him and nothing to do with you,’ she’d tell me.

  I suppose I knew she was lonely sometimes. She would read romance novels and sigh, and I knew most of my friends had both their parents living together. I suppose it was understandable my mother might want to find a partner too, even if she said that we had all we needed to be happy between the pair of us.

  But if I was nervous that day in Fiorentinis, it was nothing compared to how nervous this man, Joe, appeared to be. He was fidgeting in his seat and, as he stood up to say hello, he almost knocked over his teacup.

  I was as shy then as I am now. I stayed close to my mother, my hand gripped in hers, my cheek pressed against the soft fabric of her coat.

  ‘Heidi, this is Joe,’ she said. ‘He’s a friend of mine.’

  The man smiled, extended his hand towards mine. Dark hairs crawled from the cuff of his jacket. They looked like spiders. I cuddled in closer to my mother.

  ‘Heidi, say hello,’ she said, an urgency in her voice.

  He withdrew his hand and sat down. ‘She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to. Isn’t that right, Heidi? I’m a little nervous, too.’ His smile was kind.

  The tightness in my chest eased as he lifted his teacup and sipped from it. I dared to take a step away from the safety of my mother’s long, green woollen coat.

  ‘I know it’s cold and rainy outside, but maybe you’d like an ice cream anyway? Since we’re here?’ he asked.

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Heidi?’ My mother’s voice was more relaxed again, too.

  I nodded.

  ‘How about we get them to make you the biggest ice cream they’ve got?’ he asked and my eyes widened at the thought. There was little that seven-year-old me loved more than ice cream.

  ‘With jelly?’ I asked, because jelly came a close second.