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The Language of Lies
The Language of Lies
The Language of Lies
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The Language of Lies

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A thrilling debut novel from exciting new author Polly Bradshaw. There is a terrorist bomb plot being set in motion against London banks; Terrorists have been brought into Britain by the mysterious Mr Smith, who can procure passports as easily as he can do away with people he doesn’t care for. But where does the plot start? In Aldershot, an unsuspecting Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths, named Sasha, finds herself the target of a man, Kit Hatton, hell-bent on getting some bogus birth certificates from her, by hook or by crook. But by the time the terrorists have found their way into Britain, both Kit and his accomplice, Gary, are dead, and Gary has Sasha’s name and address in his back pocket.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherAUK Authors
Release dateMay 11, 2010
ISBN9781849891134
The Language of Lies

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    The Language of Lies - Polly Bradshaw

    Title Page

    The Language of Lies

    by

    Polly Bradshaw

    AUK Books

    Publisher Information

    The Language of Lies published in 2010 by

    Andrews UK Limited

    www.andrewsuk.com

    This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

    The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

    Copyright © Polly Bradshaw

    The right of Polly Bradshaw to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

    Dedication

    For Jamie, Jem and Tatiana

    Foreword

    Dear Reader.

    Immigration is a big issue in Britain at the moment. Whilst delivering a lecture to Somali refugees, I realized the volume and diversity of the people coming and going through the 'swing doors' of this country are phenomenal.

    And then I thought about what we know as ‘good people’, and whether they are corruptible - and about ‘bad people’, and how the distinctions are more fluid than we ever dare imagine.

    To what extent do people ever feel part of a community? The assumptions we make about class and nationality – how can we justify them, when all we ever do is look for evidence to reinforce them?

    And finally, I thought of a woman I know who can never see the bleak picture of humanity.And because she never looks for it, she (almost) never finds it.

    CHAPTER 1

    27th March 2009

    Sasha tilted forward on her chair, her face creased with the effort of enthusiasm she wished to convey. Not that it wasn’t real. But it was hard to look as if you were really, genuinely sympathetic. If you weren’t careful it came off as creepy. And she had other things on her mind today. For example, she had only this morning caught a fleeting glance of herself in one of the mirrors in the loos and wondered, vaguely, who that woman was, trying for a Michelle Pfieffer effect with her silver glasses perched on top of her head. As she peered more closely, she nearly had a fit – blinking myopically back at her was a careworn nurse, roots and all. Her lightened shoulder-length hair constantly escaped both the glasses which doubled as a kind of Alice band and the claw clip at the back of her head – an attempt at a business-like bun. She glanced down at her raggedy nails on pale, attenuated fingers, and sighed, deeply.

    But the men just leaving – a couple who were seeking a civil partnership and had come in to ask about giving notice of it, had arrived looking nervous and uncertain and left, half an hour later, their faces wreathed with adoring, grateful, relieved smiles. They had sensed at first that this woman was someone whose glamour had faded, and therefore, perhaps, was old-fashioned, prudish, lacking in modern sensibility. But they had realised, over the course of their interview, just how wrong appearances could be. She’d reassured them. She’d understood them. Talk about kind, they said afterwards. They’d felt sick with nerves, but she’d somehow got them, eventually, to laugh. Talk about lovely. What a great person to conduct the ceremony. She would certainly become a life-long friend.

    Since Sasha managed her own diary, it was up to her how long she kept people waiting. She could take as long as she liked to go to the loo, have a coffee, take a walk. But there was always a conveyer-belt feeling in her domain – people arriving, being dealt with and slipping away to make space for the next one. Same old, same old. Oh look, there’s something n………ew………. ….oh, sorry. Fooled for a second there. It was the same old stuff again.

    So, in an attempt to speed things up, more as a moral choice than anything else, she would make a coffee and drink it quickly. And to go with it, a chocolate-coated crystallised ginger. She opened the new packet and popped one in to her mouth, noting, with pleasure, the sensation of hard, bitter chocolate giving way to the softer, mouth-tingling spice root. The combination in her mouth, washed down with a gulp of coffee was exquisite, she always thought. But one was enough. Sod it, she thought. Who the hell wants one of anything. Better make it an even two. All right then, four. Obviously. And who wants a ridiculously tiny bum, anyway. Next.

    A couple of different men now arrived and one of them took a seat opposite her. She discerned a faint whiff of body odour and fags, but she was used to people in grief and doubted that she would have had a shower herself if she was going to apply for a death certificate, which they undoubtedly were. There was something similar about the men, as if cut from the same cloth. It was a look which had resulted from too little of some things and too much of others. Too little sleep, nutrition, and perhaps, Sasha suspected, kindness or care. Too much was easier – food, alcohol, cigarettes. And all probably late into the night. They looked like pub landlords. One man was more corpulent than the other, and it was he who took a seat. He was perhaps 50 years old and a slight wheezing and puffing at the hint of exertion suggested that he was not only a smoker (don’t throw stones, Sasha thought as she had only given up herself a week or so ago – again) but tired, worn out. Standing next to him was a burly man of about the same age. The standing man was evidently uneasy. ‘Is it all right?’ he asked in what Sasha took to be a Dublin accent. Anyone could tell it was Irish – but it was the ‘royt’ for ‘right’, with the suggestion of the guttural ‘cc’ at the back of the throat, before the ‘t’ that enabled her to pinpoint the place. She’d have to try to make him say the word ‘blue’ or ‘true’, she pondered, if she really wanted to know. But he seemed quiet, and in any case she assumed that he wasn’t here on his own mission, but as moral support for his friend or brother next to him. She replied, smiling : ‘Um, yeah, sure. Are you here to help your friend?’ and she looked around the room, screwing her eyes up, her short sight impeding her, as ever. ‘Sorry about this. I always have three chairs in here, but one of my colleagues must have taken one out when I went to the loo. Um ………… I’ll get you one.’

    ‘I’ll get it’, he mumbled, unable to meet her eye. ‘Back in a minute, mate’, he said to the seated man. Maybe he was closer to 60. Hard to tell with smokers, she thought. She’d probably added a few years to her own face and voice by all the smoke she had inhaled. Why do we do it, she asked herself, but without a trace of real disapproval. Being human – warts and all – this is all she wanted to be. Not Miss Bloody Sober, Thin, Immaculate, Impeccable.

    ‘Can I have your name, sir’ she asked him, using her standard polite but neutral tone. This form of address genuinely took the man aback. No-one had called him that in a very long time. Unless they were about to ask a favour or use it ironically, about to chuck him out of a pub.

    He eased himself back a little in his chair, willing now to address her face, something he had been reluctant to do when he first entered the room. ‘Yes. It’s Kit. Christopher. Hatton. Christopher Hatton’.

    ‘And your address, please?’ she asked him, pen poised, inclining her head as if hanging on his every word. Mm, he liked that. ‘Yeah. It’s 11 Coldfield gardens. Aldershot. GU11 9TR. I think. No – it’s GU11 9RT’ he said. ‘Sorry’.

    ‘That’s ok, Mr Hatton. We all get nervous at a time like this. I know I would. Coldfield Gardens. That’s lovely over there, isn’t it?’ she asked brightly. Meanwhile he was trying to get a look at her tits. Maybe when she got up. He adjusted his jumper, awkwardly, and Sasha saw that he was trying to stretch the fabric over his bulky body , as if suddenly seeing, like Adam and Eve after the serpent incident, how his body might appear to others. Flab and lard. Wobbling, rippling flesh overhanging the last-notch belt of his trousers. There were bobbles on the sweater from the cheap fibres of its weave and had a triangular pattern that reminded her of pub carpets, in red and brown. Those round necked jumpers, Sasha shuddered, without a shirt collar, just emphasised the Adam’s Apple – or in this case, the double chin. After a tiny pause, she looked at him expectantly. ‘But you’re not from there…..? Are you..?’ Her smile was playful. Kit felt nervous. Was this a game? How did she know stuff like that? ‘I’d say …… Staffordshire, maybe – somewhere up there?’ she said, and stretched her arms out in front of her with joined fingers. They both heard the joints click. A gesture of apparent intimacy, as far as Kit was concerned, but in fact a gesture of fait accompli, since she was almost always right about such matters..

    Kit knew that he might sound ‘northern’ to people. In fact only the other day he had broken the jaw of a man outside The Stag and Hounds for calling him ‘a Northern git’. But how could this woman know he was from Staffordshire – how could she, a southerner, narrow it down to a county – he’d never met anyone else who could do that. He frowned at her, but found the corners of his mouth beginning to twitch grudgingly upwards as he looked at her again. Her face was illuminated with pleasure. ‘You don’t mind?’ she asked. ‘I can’t help it. I listen to people’s voices and I hear the tone, the inflection…… and I just have to know …. I’m usually right’

    ‘Yeah. Well as it happens, I am. Cheadle, as it … um…. goes.’ And he fumbled with his key-ring – hoping that she couldn’t see how impressed he was. Or how disturbed.

    ‘Now, Mr Hatton. Let’s get on with the sad task. I know that your mother has died. I’m so sorry for your loss. I need a few details…..’

    And the next part was what Sasha called routine. It was so in more than one way. The first was that this was her job – she knew how to do it with tact and gentleness. But the second way it was routine was that regardless of what she wore or whether she had washed her hair or put on her make-up, men of a certain kind, in fact of most kinds, began to feel that they didn’t want to leave her office. Ever. Falling in love would be too strong a phrase, perhaps. But it was falling, nonetheless. Very gently, like a piece of silk slipping from a bare shoulder or a petal in a summer breeze. It made the possibility of never seeing her again feel bleak and tragic. Kit Hatton’s face, had she been close enough to see it, was frowning with the effort to understand what the hell was going on. This woman clearly fancied him. Gagging for it. And maybe she’d do. Not perfect, mind, but adequate. Soft and compliant, obviously. Polite. Subservient. Yeah – she’d definitely do.

    Just then the other man re-entered the room. ‘Sorry mate. I couldn’t find one then I needed to … the ….. toilet… you know’, and he looked at his feet.

    ‘We’re all done here, Mr, er…’ said Sasha, standing, finding that the word ‘find’ had in fact clinched his origins. It was definitely Dublin.

    ‘It’s Paddy. Padraig’, he said.

    Kit got to his feet, feeling heavy and tired. The ‘Big Boy’ breakfast he had eaten a couple of hours ago at his favourite caff, was repeating itself. It was all he could do to keep the burps inside his gullet, clamouring, as they were, to get out. But he was thinking about something else. An idea had started to creep up on him, slowly, like the old tunes of Spain.

    When they had gone out of her office, they pushed the exit door of the Town Hall annexe for Registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths’, and took themselves off to the nearest bar – a seedy backstreet pub full of sad eleven o’clock drunks. Kit was quiet, which Padraig took for taciturnity. But Kit needed time to think. The other part of his plan was emerging. It was when he saw the woman open the drawer to retrieve the death certificate. She clipped it to the rough details with which he had furnished her, ready, he supposed, to write it out in full later.

    The way he saw it he had three options, only one of which would end well for Sasha. One way or another she would give him what he wanted – coercion, deception, persuasion – he’d have to see which one was the most appropriate for my fair lady as he had already dubbed her. In the meantime – he’d play a little game. He wasn’t as stupid as people thought – oh no. He had noticed some chocolate gingers on her desk – a little detail that other people might overlook. Perhaps a packet delivered to her might send out the right message. He’d think of an original way of doing it and get her interested. Poor woman – probably a bit lonely and desperate.

    CHAPTER 2

    3rd April 2009

    Sasha awoke to the noise of a motorbike in her ear. Or a combine harvester. She opened her eyes and saw Pushkin, her tabby cat, drooling on to her pillow, purring. ‘New day’, she said to him, stroking his chin. He looked at her admiringly. ‘Let’s have some breakfast, shall we?’ and she made them both some toast and marmite – his, cut into minute squares. ‘Milkies for you, though’ she said as she made herself a coffee.

    The night cream she had been applying so assiduously lately, gave her face a rather dewy, and touchingly youthful sheen, and her face smelt a little vanilla-y, a fact which Pushkin could hardly overlook, hence the insistent purring near her face. The giving up smoking had coincided with the manic application, by night, of trowel-fuls of night cream. She had gone to bed, Smurf-like, for nearly all eight of the nights in a row, apart from when she had fallen asleep on the sofa while watching ‘Brief Encounter’, and had awoken at three in the morning, fully clothed. At the bathroom mirror, a hag leered back at her, with a deep crease where the pillow had jutted into her cheek, and a red-wine mouth, an extra outline to her lips in purple.

    And today she had noticed a puttyish pallor to her skin and a dullness to her hair – Christ – when did that happen? For how long could she forestall the inevitable crow’s feet, she wondered when she was already 38. ‘35 is the new 25’ she had read at the hairdresser’s only last week. Reaching mid thirties, as the (female) journalist had explained, only improved your appearance, your zest, your sexual confidence. It was all up-hill from here! No – that couldn’t have been it, surely? Anyhow, what was the point, Sasha wondered, of being at your sexual peak at this age when men reached theirs ten years earlier? And what was the point of peaking when the Rolls Royce version of yourself had long since been traded in for a Mondeo?

    Strangely, though, Sasha was inundated on a regular basis with dinner invitations – dates. She had to refuse them, naturally. People’s attention wasn’t always as welcome as they thought it would be. She had mentioned this only recently to Olive, the old lady whom she took shopping once a week. Olive, eighty at least, and an ex-schoolmistress, didn’t always show her gratitude to Sasha in conventional ways. She looked her up and down in the pub they always had lunch in after the shopping and sighed. ‘People think, Sasha, that you must be available because you are so nice to them’, she said. ‘And because you are not what people might call a conventional beauty…………’, and she searched Sasha’s face as she said this, hoping that honesty was the best policy and not a disappointment, ‘they sort of feel that they have discovered you. Because you have been overlooked, perhaps, by the more shallow men who seek only outward beauty’. Sasha smiled as the old lady had warmed to her theme. In fact Olive was quite wrong. Certainly people did seem to think that she loved them back, but they were just as often as not the beautiful people themselves, not the sad misfits. Olive continued. ‘You’re always so adorably friendly all the time. Remember that time I told you off for stroking that man’s arm at the bus stop – just because he was crying? Where do you think we would all be if we went round stroking sad men?, and Sasha smiled in agreement, just to put her off the scent. Because really, she thought, if I can’t reach out to people, bus stop or supermarket, I might as well give up now. It’s who I am.

    ‘The thing is, Olive’, she began, by way of explanation, ‘I see past all the crap – the smells and sniffles and so on. I don’t mean in my personal relationships. But with the public – you know. Other people find it hard. And I did too, at first. But you just get to a point where you can see beyond that stuff. It doesn’t mean, just because someone is fat or dirty or poor or repellent that they aren’t sad. Or happy, come to that. You just have to look at the – how shall I put it? Heart. Shape of the heart’. Olive nodded slowly. Her eyes, usually mirthful, were blinking, rapidly. If she wasn’t careful she’d make a fool of herself. You just can’t start blubbing in pubs.

    Sasha washed off the night cream and started to apply the day cream. What was the actual point of it all? How did the face know which was which? Couldn’t you just leave the night one on to continue to work its magic? She smiled like a pantomime dame at her reflection, exaggerating the lines and deciding they weren’t all that bad, perhaps, after all. ‘You’ve got to love yourself too, you know’ she said to Pushkin, who squeezed his eyes shut and pouted. When he did this she was sure he was puckering up for a kiss. Puss in Boots. Any minute now, she thought, he’d start asking her for a pair of fine britches, a feathered cap and some – well - boots.

    Sasha’ routine was pretty similar every day. She always walked to and from work along the canal – a stretch of path that had always seemed safe, since there were other people doing exactly the same thing. She nearly always walked part of the way with a colleague. She’d done it for years – it was a time of the day where she could gather her thoughts, reflect. And maybe walk off some of he chocolate gingers.

    Lately, though, she had sensed, once or twice, a feeling of being watched. A breath, a footstep. Nothing concrete. As she left her office she chatted to several different people, but eventually meandered towards the canal path, alone today. After around a quarter of the journey, she

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