The Truth-Teller's Lie by Sophie Hannah

closed the door on him. Her manner, he decided, was too brittle, slightly artificial. An act. He wondered if Robert Haworth had gone to Kent in order to make his final decision: Juliet or Naomi. If so, it was no surprise that his wife was on edge.
    Simon pictured Naomi sitting tensely at home, trying to apply logic to the problem of why Haworth had abandoned her. Love and lust had no respect for logic, that was the trouble. But why was Naomi Jenkins the one Simon suddenly felt sorry for? Why not the wronged wife?
    ‘Naomi thought I didn’t know about her,’ said Juliet, with a snide grin. ‘Stupid bitch. Of course I knew. I found a photograph of her on Robert’s phone. Not just her. A picture of them together, with their arms round each other, at some service station. Very romantic. I wasn’t looking—I found it by accident. Robert had left his phone on the floor. I was putting up Christmas decorations and I trod on it by mistake. There I was, pressing buttons at random, panicking because I thought I’d broken it, and suddenly I was staring at this photo. Talk about a shock,’ she muttered, more to herself than to Simon. Her eyes had started to look glassy. ‘And now I’ve got the police on my doorstep. If you ask me, Naomi Jenkins wants shooting.’
    Simon stepped away from her. He wondered how Robert Haworth had managed to keep up his weekly meetings with Naomi, if Juliet had known about the affair since before Christmas. If she’d only found out last week, that might have explained Haworth’s hasty departure to stay with friends in Kent.
    There was a half-formed question lurking in the recesses of Simon’s mind, but before he had a chance to knock it into shape, Juliet Haworth said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and closed the door in his face.
    She wasn’t the only one. Simon raised his hand to ring the bell again, then decided against it. To ask any more questions at this stage would be prying. He returned to his car with much relief, turned on the engine, and Radio 4, and had forgotten about Robert Haworth’s sordid little love triangle by the time he reached the end of the street.
     
    Charlie marched into the bar of the Hotel Playa Verde and slung her handbag down on a bar stool next to her sister’s. At least Olivia had followed her instructions and waited, instead of rushing to the airport and booking a first-class flight to New York as she’d threatened to. God, she looked out of place in that black off-the-shoulder dress. What had Liv expected? This was a four-hundred-pound, last-minute deal.
    ‘There’s nothing,’ Charlie said. She took off her glasses and wiped the rain off them with the hem of her shirt.
    ‘How can there be nothing? There must be a million hotels in Spain. I can’t believe they aren’t all better than this one, every man Jack of them.’ Olivia examined her wine glass to make sure it was clean before taking a sip.
    Neither she nor Charlie spoke more quietly than usual; neither cared if the barman heard. He was an elderly man from Swansea with two large, navy-blue butterflies tattooed on his forearms. He’d moved here, Charlie had heard him telling a customer earlier, after working for twenty years as a driving instructor. ‘I don’t miss Britain,’ he’d said. ‘It’s gone to shit.’ His sole concession to his new country of residence was to tell everyone who approached the bar that a jug of sangria was half price and would be until the end of the week.
    Charlie and Olivia were his only customers this evening, apart from an overweight, orange-skinned couple with a huddle of suitcases around them. They hunched over six peanuts in a silver dish, occasionally poking at them with their thick fingers, as if hoping to roll one over and find something remarkable beneath it. ‘You Wear It Well’ by Rod Stewart was playing very faintly in the background, but you’d have had to strain to hear it properly.
    All four walls of the Bar Arena were covered with green, red