The Lie in Our Marriage: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist (Detective Dan Riley Book 6)

THE LIE IN OUR MARRIAGE AN ABSOLUTELY GRIPPING PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER WITH A JAW-DROPPING TWIST ANNA-LOU WEATHERLEY BOOKS BY ANNA-LOU WEATHERLEYThe Lie in Our MarriageThe Night of the PartyThe Woman InsideThe Stranger’s WifeThe Couple on Cedar CloseBlack HeartPleasure IslandVengeful WivesWicked Wives CONTENTSChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 34. Dan5. MaggieChapter 6Chapter 78. DanChapter 910. MaggieChapter 11Chapter 1213. Dan14. MaggieChapter 15Chapter 1617. Dan18. MaggieChapter 19Chapter 2021. Dan22. MaggieChapter 2324. Dan25. MaggieChapter 2627. Dan28. Maggie29. Dan30. MaggieChapter 31Chapter 3233. Dan34. MaggieChapter 3536. Dan37. MaggieChapter 3839. Dan40. Maggie41. DanChapter 42Chapter 4344. Dan45. Maggie – six months laterThe Couple on Cedar ClosePrologue12Hear More from Anna-LouBooks by Anna-Lou WeatherleyA Letter from Anna-LouThe Night of the PartyThe Woman InsideThe Stranger’s WifeBlack HeartPleasure IslandVengeful WivesWicked WivesAcknowledgements The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.– Elbert Hubbard For Claire Bord, with much love. 1Greeted by a rush of cold and fetid air as she unlocks the hatch to the loft, Maggie Wendover slips off her sparkly silver Jimmy Choo sandals with one hand and hoists her silky wrap dress up around her thighs.Climbing the ladder with a sense of careful purpose, she enters the loft bottom first, swinging her legs up behind her. It’s chilly and a little creepy up here, and she feels for the light string and pulls it, illuminating the space with a welcome, warm orange glow.Barefoot, she begins to navigate her way through the boxes that are piled high like giant bricks, their dusty cardboard lids half-open like mouths waiting to be fed. Lofts are the graveyard of a home, she supposes, the place where items you once loved and treasured have been laid to rest.Maggie peers inside one of the boxes. It’s filled with old toys from when the kids were little: loose stickle bricks and a broken Etch A Sketch, Barbie dolls with shaven heads and biro-covered limbs. There’s schoolbooks and scrapbooks too, leather-look photo albums piled high and an old suitcase that was almost certainly for the rubbish tip but which, if she remembers rightly, was a wedding gift, someone from Len’s side, though she can’t recall who anymore. Bloody brain fog – she’s convinced it’s getting worse.Anyway, now she thinks of it, she was sure there had been two of them, a matching pair, because she distinctly remembers feeling terribly sophisticated as she and Len had wheeled them through the airport on the way to their honeymoon in the Costa del Sol all those years ago.Maggie stoops, picks up a teddy bear peeping out from an old black sack and smiles as a wave of nostalgia washes over her. Bongo! Ahhh, Bongo had been her son Lewis’s favourite toy as a tot. He never went anywhere without Bongo Bear right up until he was about six or seven if she remembers rightly.Poor careworn old Bongo looks a little unloved now with his patchy, balding fur and a missing eye. She replaces him carefully back into the sack with half a thought of restoring him, make him all new again to pass down to the little life that’s growing inside Casey’s tummy.A sliver of joy ripples through Maggie once again. She’s going to be a grandmother!Light with excitement and anticipation, Maggie hears the muted sound of her guests outside in the marquee below, their voices rising up through the floorboards, punctuated by joyful laughter. From a distance, she can just about make out the singer, and her heart drops as she hears the familiar melody of Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’. Len will almost certainly be looking for her now. It’s one of ‘their’ songs and he will want to dance. Bloody hell. She’ll need to get a wiggle on.She crouches down to open the door to one of the eaves where she’s stashed her secret laptop. For months she’s been creeping up here to the cold, damp and stale-smelling loft – usually while Len’s working or fiddling around on one of his vintage car projects in the garage – to prepare tonight’s surprise: a twenty-minute spectacular visual presentation of their life together so far. She’s spent weeks sifting through hundreds, probably thousands, of old photographs, cards, mementos, keepsakes and old video footage of them all throughout the years, carefully selecting the best, the funniest and the most poignant to splice them all together in a short film she plans to project onto a giant screen for tonight’s grand finale. She’s hoping to impress Len, hopes he’ll be pleased by the fact that she still wants to.She places her hand inside the eave and feels around for the laptop, her fingers searching in the dark for where she last left it. Tutting – it’s usually easy to locate – she reaches for her phone and turns on the torch app.Oh, thank goodness. She spots it wedged against something up against the back wall and… what’s that? She feels a softness against her fingertips… fabric of some sort.Grunting with exertion, she grabs it, dislodging the laptop so that it falls flat with a loud smack against the floorboards.‘Shit!’ She pulls the two items out of the eave and sits back on her haunches with a heavy sigh, her heartbeat accelerating.It’s a scarf – a woman’s scarf, though she doesn’t recognise it as her own. Doesn’t recognise it at all in fact.Curious, she instinctively brings it up to her face.Perfume. It smells of perfume, sweet and pungent, very distinctive and… familiar somehow. Is she imagining it or is it a similar smell to the perfume her neighbour, Brenda, is wearing tonight?She feels a strange fluttering sensation in her chest. Well, whoever it belongs to, it’s been worn recently – had to have been for it to still smell of perfume, surely?She studies it closely… it’s patterned pink with skulls – little black skulls – printed all over, and it’s stained with spots, random dark-brown splashes like paint. It was definitely not there the last time she was up here, just the day before yesterday. The small eave where she’s