THE LIAR’S DAUGHTER
Claire Allan is a former journalist from Derry in Northern
Ireland, where she still lives with her husband, two children,
two cats and a hyperactive puppy.
In her eighteen years as a journalist she covered a wide range
of stories from attempted murders, to court sessions, to the
Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday right down
to the local parish notes.
She has previously published eight women’s fiction novels. Her
first thriller, Her Name Was Rose, was published in 2018 and became a USA Today bestseller, followed by Apple of My Eye in 2019.
When she’s not writing, she’ll more than likely be found on
Twitter @claireallan.
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Also by Claire Allan:
Her Name Was Rose
Apple of My Eye
Forget Me Not
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CLAIRE ALLAN
LIBBY CARPENTER
THE LIAR’S
99 RED BALLOONS
DAUGHTER
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Published by Avon
A division of HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
A Paperback Original 2019
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Copyright © Claire Allan 2019
Claire Allan asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
Canadian ISBN 978-0-00833-625-7
UK ISBN 978-0-00832-194-9
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.
Set in Bembo Std by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
This book is produced from independently certifi ed FSC™ paper
This book is produced from independently certified FSC™ paper
to ensure responsible forest management.
to ensure responsible forest management.
For more information visit: www.harpercollins.co.uk/green
For more information visit: www.harpercollins.co.uk/green
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To my children,
who make me want to be a best person
I can be every single day.
I love you both so much.
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Prologue
Now
Joe
They’ve told me I’m dying. A doctor in a white coat, 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 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
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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.
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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
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it had company, all through his body. ‘Riddled with it,’ he said, sadly, 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 always has 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.
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.
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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, espe-
cially 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.
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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 respon-
sibility 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 call
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Ciara for me? She should know how ill I am. Or maybe you’ve spoken to her already?’
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 relation-
ship 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 who 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.
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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.
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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, lift 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 understand-
able 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,