The Perfect Lie

Chapter 1: First Light

Ellie Perry was the first one up the hill on Sunday morning. Later she would wish, more than anything, that she had stayed in bed.

It was twenty to seven, and the sky over the Gresham Estate was the colour of skimmed milk. Mist lay in the dips between the rows of vines. Beyond the chalk ridge the sea was a flat grey line. Ellie drove her grandfather's old Fiesta up the track with the window down because the heater smelled of burning dust, and the cold air made her eyes water.

She had come early for the camera. On Saturday afternoon she had climbed the bell tower above the old stable block and strapped her spare phone to the railing, pointed at the courtyard and the long sweep of hills beyond, set to take one frame every ten seconds through the night. Harvest moon over Coombe Down. If it worked, it would be the best thing she had posted all season. If it hadn't, she wanted to know before the pickers arrived at eight and started asking her to film them holding bunches of grapes beside their faces.

She parked by the barns and got out. The yard was quiet. Somewhere a wood pigeon was calling. The trestle tables from Friday's pickers' barbecue were still stacked against the barn wall, and a gold paper napkin from last night's supper had blown across the cobbles and caught against a drain.

Ellie started towards the bell tower. Then she stopped.

The fermentation hall was the newest building on the estate, a long shed of pale steel and glass built against the hillside where the caves began. Above its double doors sat a small green lamp. Her grandfather Arthur, who had been foreman here for thirty years before his knees gave out, had told her about that lamp on her very first day. Green meant the extraction fans were running. Green meant safe. During harvest the young wine in the tanks breathed out carbon dioxide all day and all night, a gas you could not see or smell, and without the fans it would settle on the floor and rise like water filling a bath.

'Never go in there when the light's off,' Arthur had said, pointing a finger as thick as a cork. 'Not to fetch a glove. Not to save a life. You come and get someone.'

The green lamp was dark.

Ellie walked closer. Her trainers were loud on the cobbles. The double doors were shut, and wedged against the handles, pushed hard into the gap at an angle, was the red pallet jack that usually lived in the bottling shed. Its forks had been jammed under one handle so that the door could not be opened from the inside.

Beside the doors was the gas alarm panel, a grey box with a small screen. Normally it showed a row of numbers and the word NORMAL in green. This morning the screen read ALARM SILENCED, and below it, blinking red, FANS OFF.

Ellie's mouth went dry. She stepped up to the glass panel in the door, cupped her hands against it and looked in.

The hall was dim. Two long rows of steel tanks stood like silver pillars, each one taller than a man, with ladders and walkways running between them. A pump hose lay coiled on the concrete. At the far end, a door stood half open into the small cool room where the bottles were kept.

Between the third and fourth tanks, on the floor, a man lay face down.

He wore a cream dinner jacket and black trousers. One arm was stretched out towards the doors, the fingers curled. Around him the concrete glittered with broken glass, thick dark-green shards, the heavy glass of magnums, and the floor near his shoulder was stained with a long, pale spill of wine.

Ellie could not see his face. It was turned away from her, towards the tank, and his head lay in the deep shadow beneath it. All she could see was the back of the jacket, the dark trousers and one pale hand.

Every man at last night's Harvest Supper had worn a cream dinner jacket. It was Mr Gresham's rule, every year, a nod to the old-fashioned dinners of his youth. Ellie had spent the whole evening filming them, eighty guests in the candlelit caves, and half of them had been men in cream jackets. Mr Gresham himself. His son, Oliver. The television critic with the big laugh. The French lady's lawyer. A dozen neighbours and buyers and journalists.

She banged on the glass with the flat of her hand. 'Hello? Can you hear me? Hello!'

The man did not move.

Her hand went to the pallet jack. She could drag it clear in two seconds. She could pull the door open and run in and turn him over. Her fingers were actually closing round the metal handle when she heard her grandfather's voice as clearly as if he were standing beside her. Not to save a life. You come and get someone.

If she opened that door, the gas would pour out over her feet. If she went in, she would be lying on the floor beside him within a minute.

Ellie let go of the jack. She stepped back. Then she turned and ran for the big house, across the yard and through the arch and up the gravel drive, shouting for help at the top of her voice, her phone forgotten in her pocket, her breath tearing in her chest.

She did not know which of them it was. She only knew that whoever had wedged that door had wanted him to stay inside.