The Truth-Teller's Lie by Sophie Hannah Page A

and navy tartan wallpaper. The ceiling was nicotine-stained Artex. Still, it was the only place to be if you were unfortunate enough to be in the Hotel Playa Verde, since at least it served alcohol. There was no minibar in the tiny room Charlie and Olivia were sharing. This came as a shock to Olivia, who opened every drawer in the cupboard and bent to peer inside it, insisting, ‘It must be here somewhere.’
    A net curtain that stank of old cigarettes and grease hung at the bedroom’s narrow window. It couldn’t have been washed for years. The bed Olivia chose because it was closer to the en-suite bathroom was so close that it actually blocked the doorway. If Charlie needed to go to the loo in the night, she would have to climb across the bottom of her sister’s bed. She’d made the effort this afternoon and found dried toothpaste stuck to one of the two plastic glasses by the basin, and a stranger’s soggy hair clogging the bath’s plughole. So far the fire alarm had gone off twice for no noticeable reason. Each time it had been over half an hour before someone had had the gumption to turn it off.
    ‘Did you look on the Internet?’ asked Olivia
    ‘Where do you think I’ve been for the past two hours?’ Charlie took a deep breath and ordered a brandy and dry ginger, once more refusing the barman’s offer of half-price sangria, moulding her face into a false smile when he mentioned that she had until the end of the week to take advantage of this one-off special rate. She lit a cigarette, thinking that smoking couldn’t possibly be bad for your health in situations like this, even if it was the rest of the time. The end of the week seemed very, very far away. Plenty of time to kill herself, then, if things didn’t get any better. Perhaps she ought to suicide-bomb the shitty hotel.
    ‘Trust me, there was nothing you’d have approved of,’ she told Olivia.
    ‘So there were places with availability?’
    ‘A few. But either they didn’t have pools or they weren’t right on a beach or they had no air conditioning or only a buffet in the evenings . . .’
    Olivia was shaking her head. ‘We’re hardly going to need air conditioning or a pool at this rate,’ she said. ‘It’s cold and rainy. I told you it was too early in the year for Spain.’
    A tight ball of heat began to expand in Charlie’s chest. ‘You also said you didn’t want a long-haul flight.’ Olivia had suggested going away in June, to avoid what she called ‘hot-weather anxiety’. Charlie had thought it a good idea; the last thing she wanted was to have to watch her sister leap out of bed every morning at six, run to the window and howl, ‘I can’t see any sun yet!’ But Detective Inspector Proust had put the kaibosh on the plan. Too many people were going to be away in June, he’d said. There was Gibbs’s honeymoon, for a start. And before that Sellers had booked an illicit holiday with his girlfriend, Suki. The official story was that he was going away with CID on a residential team-building trip. Meanwhile his wife Stacey would be in Spilling, not unlikely to bump into Charlie, Simon, Gibbs, Proust—the people Sellers had told her he’d be swinging on ropes and crawling through mud with in the depths of the countryside. Charlie was amazed Sellers’ double life had lasted as long as it had, given that his lies were so ill-thought-out.
    ‘So you wouldn’t mind somewhere with no pool and no air conditioning? ’ said Charlie, suspicious of what appeared to be an easy solution. There had to be a catch.
    ‘I mind that it’s not sunny and I mind that it’s colder than it is in London.’ Olivia sat straight-backed on her bar stool, legs crossed. She looked elegant and disappointed, like a jilted spinster from one of those long, boring films Charlie hated, full of hats and sullied reputations. ‘But there’s nothing I can do about it, and I’m certainly not going to sit by an outdoor pool in the pissing rain.’ Her eyes lit